Landslide
by Lyricara
Summary: After years of never-ending rain, even the strongest of mountains will crumble. No wall can survive the onslaught when there is a landslide to bring it down.
1. Chapter 1

**Authors Note: **

I fell in love with this show again. I fell in love with them again. I fell in love with this amazing fandom again, and all the wild theories we throw around on Twitter. I may have run with one of them, but changed the villain. So I'm trying this writing again, and with the help of my insanely wonderful and talented guardian writing angel Mousie, Amy's daily encouragement, and the wise words of JessicaR_NY, I've found the guts to post this after years away from writing in general. They are not mine, but I wish they were. Please bear with me, I have a few chapters already done and there's a story in me to tell.

-o0o-

* * *

The horror is blooming inside of her.

She knows it's coming, and that at some point – like an avalanche – she will no longer be able to outrun it. She knows it will swallow her up, bury her. Suffocate her.

Everyone has a breaking point. Until now she had always somehow come back from the brink. She'd clawed her way back into normalcy more than a few times, scraping for every inch of safety until she could breathe again.

But this is more than she can comprehend.

Her long coat is still wet, because despite the umbrella someone had tried to cover her with the rain had still found her. It had found her as colleagues had spoken about him, as his wife had. It found her as she had stood there and silently tried to say goodbye, as she'd laid a flower on his casket, as the sound of the bagpipes had replaced the blood in her veins.

Even the clouds had bowed low today, grieving.

She'd been drowning at his funeral, but now she's starting to burn from the inside out. The white flower arrangement sits wrapped in cellophane on her desk, a grotesque taunt that had been waiting for her after a brutal week and a debilitating day.

She holds the card in her hands, staring at the words through blurred eyes.

_My dearest Olivia,_

_To lose two men you loved to their own hands is terrible._

_You must wonder what you did to cause the loss, do you not?_

_Life is unexpected, and death is the only thing promised._

_It must leave you concerned about which man will leave you next?_

_Condolences,_

_Sir Tobias Moore_

Despite the unimaginable way the walls feel like they are closing in, she cannot crack.

She knew that losing the case against Moore would come back to haunt them. Haunt her. She just hadn't expected this even in the darkest scenario.

Keeping Moore behind bars should have been a given, but he'd had access to the best defense money could buy. During the long days in the courtroom, she'd watched disbelievingly as their case against him unraveled. He had convinced the jury that he had legitimately auditioned Kat for the role of a hooker by producing a backdated PicFlix movie script to that effect and he'd won an acquittal.

She'd immediately gone to Hadid with half a dozen more accusers. She'd pleaded with the ADA to at least review the victim statements. But the woman had refused, citing the lack of physical evidence and an unwillingness to make the NYPD and DA's office look incompetent once again.

Moore had laughed as he'd been released, asking her to join him in the Caymans for a much-needed vacation.

_I make everyone a star, Olivia, _he'd said outside of the courtroom_. I even made you a Captain. _

She'd known she couldn't chase him out of the country. It would be up to the FBI to get him next. Even One PP had made her a promise that they'd push for the Bureau to actively monitor him.

She stares at the small card now, the words jumbling and unraveling everything she's believed up until this moment.

_I've been clean for five years, Olivia. You're my only family and I want to get to know my nephew. _

Her brother had sworn he had stayed off the drugs, that he was making a new life for himself.

The chemotherapy, the new house, the new marriage.

Ed had been fighting for every minute he had left; he wouldn't have wasted a day by ending his life early. Her gut has known that all along, and that's why she hasn't been able to accept his choice even when his wife had found peace with it. Even when he'd left a note and used his own .38. Even when everyone said he was choosing to go out on his own terms.

Suicide wasn't in character for the man she'd known.

None of it had made sense. Until now.

The card falls out of her hand and onto her desk. The magnitude of the words on it slamming into her as the pieces fall into place.

_Noah. _

_Oh God, Noah. _

The fear is sudden, the implications crushing. She hasn't seen her son in hours.

"_Fin!" _Her yell is too loud and her voice cracks, but she does it again anyway. "Fin!"

She grabs her cell phone and dials even as she hears the scrape of his chair and the rush of footsteps into her office. Her call connects on the second ring and she can't even think beyond the slamming of her pulse.

"Hi Mom! When are you going to be home?"

Every inch of her is shaking as her son cheerfully answers Lucy's phone. She pinches the bridge of her nose to ward off the throbbing, knowing Fin is waiting for a response.

Her whole life is on the other end of the line. She cannot let him know she's terrified.

"Baby, I'm going to be here a while so I'm going to have some police officers bring you here, ok? Can you get your schoolbag together quickly while I talk to Lucy?" Olivia's voice is breaking, and it's enough that Fin locks his concerned eyes on her and nods, immediately heading back into the bullpen to make arrangements.

"Okay, Mom. Can I bring the iPad too? Lucy found this new app for drawing and I'm making something for you. But it's a surprise, so I can't tell you what it is until-"

"I'd love that Noah, now put Lucy on the phone. I need to talk to her right away." Her mind is racing, and she has to keep it together for her child. He deserves for her to keep her goddamned shit together.

No crying. No damned crying.

She's needs her son safe _now_. She needs him in her arms. In this office, surrounded by protection. Only it will take her too long to get him, patrol can get to him faster.

It's a blur then. The instructions she thinks she gives to Lucy. The seconds that tick by. The paralyzing fear that floods every pore of her skin and chills her to her core.

_You really are a stupid bitch. Do you know who you're dealing with? _

Moore had said that once, and she'd ignored him.

Her brother had not overdosed. A man she had cared deeply about had not committed suicide. She knows that in her gut. She knows how sadistic men taunt, the games they play.

They'd both been killed.

Because of _her._

And Sir Tobias Moore, the billionaire with every resource in the world to make her life an utter, living hell – he is taunting her about who he's going after next.

-o0o-

* * *

"Rollins is on her way to your place. Uniforms are already there and Lucy is packing. Should be back here in under thirty minutes." Fin's voice is low and carefully controlled as he walks into her office. "I reached Cassidy, Munch and Amaro."

Olivia nods, afraid that if she says anything her voice will waver. She knows her face is a mess, her eyes burn. The grief and panic are at war within her, and she needs to get everything under control fast or One PP will strip her of any authority at all until this is over. "Barba?"

"Workin' on it."

As it is, she doesn't know who to trust within the department. Beyond her own squad, everyone is suspect. She'd hand selected the patrol she'd sent for Noah, and she isn't going to exhale until he is safely in her office.

It's her job to command this unit. They have a manhunt on their hands and she has sheer minutes before the chaos of the investigation descends upon her office. She hunches over her desk, dropping her forehead into her palms.

Moore had told her she would be sorry. He'd asked her if she had hated all men. He'd warned her that she didn't know what she was doing.

She had taken all of the threats as posturing and she hadn't looked back. She exhales hard, trying to slow the racing of her pulse.

Just _breathe._

At least she has the full backing of the department now. No one had questioned the veracity of the threat, even if Moore hadn't been explicit in his note. It was only when she'd called Deputy Chief Garland that she'd learned the truth behind their instant support.

One PP already had reason to believe Ed's death was not a suicide. An hour before his body had been discovered, he'd been on the phone with his doctor who had reported the call cut short by a confrontational commotion.

Someone had forced Ed to do what he had done. Now they know why.

The nausea swirls in stomach again. She knows what it's like to hold a gun to a head and pull the trigger. She'd had to do it to herself. More than once.

Only she'd been lucky.

"Liv." Fin's tone is somber. The apologies for what he's about to say are evident just in the way he says her name. In the way he doesn't call her Captain.

She lifts her face then. "It's already done." She can't admit to him that just after she'd taken care of Noah, she'd immediately sent two uniforms she trusted _there_, too. It had been Noah, then him. His wife. His kids.

Then the rest. Cassidy. Carisi. Munch. Amaro. Barba. Stone. Dodds.

She's got a detail heading for Simon's kids and Tracy already. Too little, too late.

Olivia presses her lips together, willing herself not to cry.

"Blame yourself and you're done before you start, Liv." Fin has taken over where she has faltered in the last half hour. "You gotta fight first and deal with the fallout later or they're gonna take you off this."

"I need to know everyone is safe right now." Her voice cracks and she clears it, trying for some semblance of control. "Then we start with his financials. This isn't happening without a lot of money changing hands. But first I need everyone…_safe."_

Her hands are shaking where they now rest on her desk. She clasps one in the other, hoping he hasn't noticed. She knows how to deal with a single enemy, but Moore has unprecedented reach. Months ago she had watched half of the department brass, the Southern District and the DA's office walk into Moore's building right after the heat had come down on him.

Absolutely anyone could be in on this. Moore had unbelievably beaten the odds at trial, and he hadn't done that without help. Now he's operating unchecked and from God knows where.

When she makes eye contact with Fin again, she realizes he's staring at her hands. "I'm okay, Fin. I am. You have to trust me—"

"Captain?"

Olivia turns to her doorway where Kat is leaning in. "Tell me you got to everyone."

"Getting there. I only got a Kathy Stabler at the Stabler residence in Queens. She said her ex-husband doesn't live there anymore but she gave me his cell. She hasn't heard from him since yesterday. The uniforms are taking her and her son to a hotel and will sit on it as you asked. I've texted that number she gave me but nothing back yet."

She can't even process the extended implications of what her officer is telling her. She should have called Kathy herself but she's had to run command so far and there hasn't been time to even call her son again let alone anyone else.

Elliot.

The fear is so constricting that it threatens to choke her. "Does she know where he might be? Address? He's got grown kids, too. I need…I need to make sure that we've covered this. Fin…"

"Like you said, he's targeting the men, Liv. We'll get someone on the kids, but this is Stabler we're talking about. He can take care of himself."

"Not if he doesn't know!" Olivia stands suddenly and braces herself on her desk because the vertigo is making her dizzy. _Not since yesterday_. "Find him, Fin. Just find him. _Please."_

She stops herself from asking Kat for the number. She cannot – cannot – call him herself.

The sound of his voicemail will cut right now more so than ever.

She locks eyes with Fin, and his concern for her clouds his expression. She doesn't need anyone to worry about her. This is a game of human dominoes. Moore wants every man she's ever cared about to fall, and he wants her left standing only long enough that she will crumble in the aftermath.

Bile swirls in her stomach. Her son is okay for now, but they have no idea where Elliot is.

_Not him. _

_Not. _

_Him. _

Fin finally nods. "We'll find him," he says quietly.

Within seconds, he and Kat have left her office.

Olivia slumps back into her chair and squeezes her eyes shut. Nine years she'd managed to stay away from him. She'd kept this unit – her chaos – away from him and his life. She'd fought through every single nightmare alone, willing herself to stay away from his doorstep because it was clear he wanted nothing to do with anyone or anything associated with the department anymore.

He had been protecting himself and his family by walking away.

She too had finally learned to stay away from him, telling herself that distance was the only way she could protect him from a life that had almost cost him everything. It was the only way she could rationalize away the devastating feeling of abandonment. It was how she had reasoned with herself after Lewis – on nights when she had ruthlessly isolated herself because the shaking wouldn't stop.

It was for his protection_._

Only she hadn't protected him at all.

Kathy hadn't heard from him since yesterday.

Olivia tells herself that might be normal. If they're divorced that could be normal. She can't assume the worst. He might be out there, safe. As yet unaware of what she'd caused.

It was either that or Moore figured out how to completely destroy her after all.

-o0o-


	2. Chapter 2

**Authors Note: **

Thank you so much for EVERY review and tweet, I'm really happy to be doing this again, even if it makes me nervous. Mousie, you know you're my everything and you're the panic attack slayer. Can't believe you'll still be there for my nonsense all these years later. These babies still aren't mine, no matter how much I beg.

**Chapter 2**

* * *

Elliot flips the switch, illuminating the small apartment with the garish glow of fluorescent overhead lighting.

He scans the space around him, not expecting a threat tonight but eyeing the corners anyway. It's barely more than a studio - a bed, bathroom, television, small dinette, couch and some basic things in the kitchen – and with the way he had left the two closet doors and bathroom door open before he left, he's pretty sure that he doesn't have company.

After all the years of this, he trusts his gut instinct more than his line of sight anyway.

He's alone tonight.

Again.

He tosses the paper bag with the hot sub on the counter and shrugs out of the shitty secondhand coat, throwing it on the kitchen table before exhaling. He's been living here over a month so he knows there are some beers left in the fridge, some over the counter pain killers in the drawer. He's got some clothes they gave him in the closet and a few things in the bathroom, he doesn't need much more.

There is a faint smell to the place. As if the sewer pipes have never quite cleared.

Or maybe that's just this part of Newark.

He opens one of the drawers in the kitchen and reaches behind the stack of bills made out to Robert James Wooster, fiddling with the catch in the back. Click twice, up once. It's a rudimentary failsafe, but it's secure enough to store the personal phone that he pulls out now.

He powers it on, leaving the iPhone on the counter as he reaches for the beer. He'll only have one. Maybe two.

He misses the days of being able to drink it all away. Another useless, unproductive day of this filth doesn't make him feel any better.

The device lights up as he flips the top off the first beer, and he grabs it and the food before heading for the couch.

He barely has the television on before the messages start popping up on his screen, the voicemails lighting up too.

_Call in. _

_Call in immediately. _

Then, thirty minutes ago - _Sending a car for you. Meet at the pickup in 45. Leave everything. _

He had stopped for food and had been late getting to his phone, they must be wondering where the hell he is. His adrenaline picks up, wondering what had changed their plans and why.

Then a number he doesn't recognize.

_This is Officer Tamin with NYPD. Please call me._ _It's urgent._

But he only has a second to care, because the next one makes every muscle still.

His ex-wife.

_Where are you? It's an emergency. Please call back. _

_Please!_

_We're safe. But they're moving us. Why?_

The messages aren't done, but he's already on his feet, heading for the back closet. One more safe space in the bedroom. His issued Glock 26 is in there.

He's dialing work first, because if his family is safe then the first thing he needs is to know what the hell is going on.

The other man answers before the first ring is even done. "Where have you been?"

He grabs his official holster and starts putting it on. "Why the fuck is my family being moved?"

"They're safe. NYPD tried to take jurisdiction, but we have them now. They're good. Everyone. Your wife and son are being taken to a hotel where they can shelter in place. Your daughter Liz is going to join them there. The others have details on their residences."

His head is starting to pound as he fumbles in the safe space for the wallet. "They didn't make me. I don't get why-"

"That isn't why you're being brought in." The other man is too calm. Too rational. Then again he's always been a stoic prick.

His hand closes around the black leather billfold. "Then why the fire drill?"

There is a long exhale over the line. "You're a target. We have reason to believe there's a hit out on you."

He straightens, not questioning the intel but not understanding why. "I just fucking told you, they haven't made me. They're not after me."

The pause on the other end is unusual. His handler sounds like he's being careful when normally he's cold, precise. Factual.

"They're not trying to get to you. You're collateral damage. They're after someone else."

He grabs his own leather jacket from the closet, like hell he will put on that rat-ass thing they had given him to wear. He flips open the wallet, making sure everything is in there before he leaves this shithole. He's under the distinct impression his job here might be done. It's been going nowhere anyway.

"Who?"

His eyes drop to the badge that will never be familiar. The ID that will never look right. FBI. How the hell this even happened he still doesn't know, but it is what it is. How it is.

The darkness, he remembers. The darkness had been like quicksand, and this had been an out. It had been a chance to escape.

Only he had never really escaped at all.

Silence.

"Who are they after? And how do I fit in?"

"Stabler, come in. Ten minutes and the car will be at the pickup."

"I've been out here a month, if you're pulling me in then I have a right to know why."

The other agent delays another second. And then, "It's Olivia."

He stops, his hand gripping the doorknob. It's a sucker punch. A fist right to his gut, his throat, his temples. For one weak moment, he closes his eyes. Focuses on breathing. His heartbeat slows until he swears he can hear every pound of it echo in his veins.

_Nine years_. _Nine years._ It keeps repeating itself in his head. Over three thousand days.

"-she's okay. For now. There's a threat that targets every male around her. Lost an NYPD Captain and her brother already. It's likely coming from within."

"Cragen?" he barely manages to push out of his throat, finally opening the door and making his way down the shadowed hall of the building.

"No, we're pretty sure he's somewhere off the coast of Florida on a boating trip right now. We're trying to make contact. Coast Guard is aware."

He doesn't even ask who then, because the other half of the horror suddenly hits him hard. _Simon._

The way it slices into him, he can't even comprehend what she's going through. He'd never liked the guy but he was her brother_._ Some bastard took something from her again and fuck it all.

Fuck this.

The other agent is quiet. He knows Olivia too. Knows Simon. He knows how little she has always had left to lose.

This time, no one is going after her without him around. This time he's in fighting shape. His head is in it, he's got a federal badge and assets and despite what anyone tells him, he's got a right to be there.

This time he gets to tear someone apart.

"I want in on it, Porter. This is ours, right? If NYPD is compromised, this is ours."

"Stabler—"

"My family is good?"

"Yeah, you have my word."

"Then I want to see her. Now_."_

This time it's his. His. He's different these days. No one will be able to stop him, not even this job. If they hold him back, they can have this badge too. He doesn't care.

Even if she doesn't want him around, this time it's his to fix. No matter what.

And fuck everyone, because his life be damned, there will never be a next time that anyone goes after her.

-o0o-

* * *

He's not used to having this many options.

It's been over a month since he can last remember being out of his office building before eleven, and he's been surviving on whatever was open most nights. Chinese, pizza, even some meat passing for hotdogs. His arteries absolutely hate him, and lately his stomach has been joining in the protest.

But now, at eight-thirty, the world is still a veritable plethora of culinary options.

He ducks into the Pret A Manger two blocks from his apartment, the idea of a hot chicken parmesan wrap and fresh soup making his stomach grumble with anticipation. With the way his latest trial is going, it's making him anxious that his phone died while he had been at the gym, but another fifteen minutes and they can have access to him again.

He's stopping for wine, too. A big bottle of an ultra-smooth cabernet. He will probably fall asleep two glasses in, but this is how he's going down tonight. Full, a little drunk and with eight hours of sleep ahead.

A smarter man would have called Alyssa, because it's been an embarrassing number of days since he'd last spoken to her, and even more since he'd had sex, but tonight he just needs the time alone. The last thing he wants to do is make conversation or share his bed.

In less than ten minutes, he's holding a very promising full bag of food – even thinking ahead and ordering a breakfast sandwich for the morning – and he's mulling over his wine options. A Stag's Leap? A Jordan? No, Caymus.

He sure as hell deserves it. He's been fighting an impossible case the last few weeks and somehow still finding a way to win the battles - if not the war as yet.

There is a bell on the door to Forman's Liquor, and it prattles as he walks in. For some odd reason the sound makes him upbeat, as if he's about to celebrate a lone night of civil living in his apartment.

When he asks for the Caymus, the owner's eyebrows shoot up a little. "Special night?" the old man asks.

The guy wouldn't understand that just a few hours of peace and quiet is indeed a special night, so he just grins back. "You could say that."

"What year are you looking for, son? I got 2013, 2016 and 2019. You want anything further back than that, and I'd haveta order it for you."

He can afford the 2013, but there's a good chance he won't get through half the bottle before it goes to waste, so he settles on the 2016. For some reason his mood lightens as he grips the brown paper bag as he leaves. Maybe after a glass of the $100 bottle he'll call Alyssa after all. She'd understand if he tells her she can't stay the night. They've been doing this occasionally for a few months now, and there's no pressure.

No expectations.

The night is looking up. It's not unreasonably cold, it isn't raining or snowing, and his food is still warm. The Knicks are playing, and he can still catch the second half of the game.

_So this is what it's like for those who don't work their life away_, he muses. He heads toward his building, just on the south edge of Hell's Kitchen. The street is rather empty, but it's early enough that dozens of the apartment windows are illuminated, televisions flickering in some. He can hear a woman laughing loudly at the other end of the block, and even if he can't see her it makes him smile.

Yeah, he'll call Alyssa. If she's free, great. If she's not, no problem.

Lost in thought, he never hears the footsteps that creep up behind him. He never hears a tell-tale breath or feels the air shift.

It's the last thing that runs through his mind before the blast.

_Sonofabitch was a ghost. _

-o0o-

* * *

It's a dichotomy of belonging and displacement that hits him hard as soon as Porter pulls the vehicle in front of the 1-6.

The building lights are new, there are new brick barricades that protect the front steps. Bigger windows flank the front doors and despite the way they frame the brightly lit lobby, he knows they are now bulletproof.

"Remember she doesn't know, Stabler," Porter says quietly.

As if he can fucking forget.

Porter had asked him to work a child trafficking case undercover six years ago. With his SVU background and lack of an NYPD badge or official complications, he'd been ripe for the picking. In truth he'd been ripe for anything that would get him out of the house, get the beer or whiskey out of his hand, give him any sense of purpose. Even Kathy had encouraged him, desperate for anything that would change the destructive status quo of the previous six months.

He'd had anger to put somewhere. The fury needed an outlet. Even he'd known he was coming dangerously unraveled.

They'd brought him in for one case. He'd brought hell raining down upon their suspect in less than two months. That should have been the end of it.

But undercover assignments had proved to be far too alluring for him to walk away from. They were the ultimate escape. A chance to be someone else. In between he'd go home, be a father. But he'd never again managed to be a husband.

He'd never managed to forget.

For the last six years, only his family and the feds have known he is with the Bureau. He is as off the books as the agency can keep him, zero chance of anyone running his name and figuring out who or where he is. It's safer for his kids that way. Safer for Kathy. For him.

For everyone.

Then again, in the back of his mind he'd always known there might come a day.

"You owe me," Elliot tells him, no inflection in his words. "She's going to tell me to go to hell, and she'll be right. But since we own this, you're keeping me on no matter what One PP sends down. You got that?"

He doesn't care about Porter's own history with Olivia. He's spent six years of his life living in hellhole after hellhole – away from his kids too often - and the Bureau is going to give him an ounce of payback right now.

"Don't act like an asshole in there, Stabler. I know that's a stretch for you, but pissing all over a squad you haven't been inside of in nearly decade isn't going to win you points with anyone. Least of all with Olivia."

He gets out of the car then, his blood simmering. "You don't wanna go there. You stay out of everything between Olivia and I."

Across the roof of the car, Porter cocks his head and stares back for a long second before slamming his car door shut. "Is there anything left to get in the middle of? Like you said, you haven't ever returned a phone call. I'm thinking she's going to be a lot happier to see me than you."

He's so far beyond taking the bait now, though. Besides, he can't argue with the truth.

Porter signs them in and everything comes back, seeping into Elliot's skin. The air of the building is the same. The sounds echo the same. The doors of the elevators beep the same.

It's unsettling how little everything has changed when everything inside of him is so grotesquely different. Thousands of times he'd been here. Her stride had always matched his, she would outpace him sometimes in the later years. This building had been his home, his comfort. The place he shared with her.

This was the house that their partnership had built.

He hasn't been back to the squad room since that day. Not once.

The elevator opens and he exhales, knowing Porter is watching him like a hawk. He's waiting for any reason to intervene. But nine years later and it is only the memories of Olivia that shake him up as he steps off the elevator and heads down a too-familiar hall.

"You good?" Porter says under his breath, stopping short of fully walking in.

Elliot stops, too. The desks are different, the computer screens bigger. There are conference tables and unfamiliar faces. It smells cleaner than it had all those years ago. Maybe the heating system had finally been replaced.

He will not let Porter see one ounce of his fear. This had once been _his_ and he will be damned if Porter is more comfortable here now.

His gaze finds only a young dark-haired detective at her desk. She looks up at him and stands, coming toward them.

The squad room has that familiar hum to it, the one that always felt like the calm before the incoming storm. The FBI and NYPD brass are about to descend, he and Porter are just at the front edge of the wave.

"Can I help you?" she asks, blocking his entrance to the rest of the room.

"Where's Olivia?" Elliot asks the question – says her name - before he can stop himself. His eyes are already on the office that Cragen used to occupy. He knows she made Captain; he'd had a few beers the night he'd found out. He'd toasted her silently and then gone for a run that had lasted miles too long.

But the shades are drawn on the office, and he's got no idea if she's even here at all.

The woman in front of him furrows her brow, tilting her head as she crosses her arms across her chest. "And you are?"

"That's Stabler, and he's got no fucking business bein' here. The other one is Porter, he's a shady fed and we don't need either of them around."

Elliot looks to his left at Fin, bracing himself. The familiarity and discord clash under his skin, and he forces himself to keep his voice low and steady. "Fin—"

But the other man steps up, blocking his view of the office windows. "Sergeant Tutuola," he counters, staring him down. "First name is friends only."

Elliot stands toe-to-toe with him, but all of the fight within him is instantly gone. The truth is that he's grateful to Fin for standing by Olivia for all this time; he's jealous of the years Fin's had next to her that he himself has not. "I'm not here to argue with you or make problems, Fin." He's quiet now. Apologetic.

This is about Olivia now. This is her house, her squad.

Her life that he's storming into.

He won't ever fault Fin for protecting her.

It's Porter who ends the standoff. "Glad this little reunion is over. Pretty sure we all know One PP has handed this to us. You have a dead Captain and some brothers in blue who have probably made a second income thanks to Sir Tobias, so can we skip the formalities?" Porter smiles, always too smug and brusque for his own good. "Now - as Agent Stabler just asked you - where is Captain Benson?"

Fin's body goes rigid and he straightens, a look of disgust evident on his face as he stills. He glares at Elliot. "What the fuck?"

He deserves everything he gets. He knows this. He knows how it looks. He'd walked away from the unit – from _her_ – only to go back to the same life somewhere else. No one will understand why. No one will give a shit that going back to the job was the only thing that had saved him from an abyss that had threatened everything and everyone who depended on him.

"Please Fin," he clears his throat, trying for volume. "Where is she?"

Fin doesn't move. "She's in the playroom with her _son." _

The word is intended to hurt him, to show him how much he doesn't know.

Only he knows.

He knows far more than Fin could ever imagine. He knows Noah's birthday, knows about Ellie and Johnny Drake. He knows about how she almost lost her little boy more than once. He knows about the kidnapping by the boy's grandmother. He'd run a background check on her son's baseball coach, teacher and nanny after that.

He fucking _knows._

He's silent, but he doesn't drop his gaze.

"Can we move this into the office please and wait for her there, Sergeant?" Porter finally asks, pointedly dismissing the female detective. "We've got half a dozen agents and our ASAC on their way. It would be good to get in sync with Captain Benson before they arrive."

It's a few more silent moments before Fin finally relents, heading towards the office and expecting them to follow. When they are in the smaller room, Elliot stills.

She's everywhere in here. Her desk, her sweater on the back of her chair, a pair of glasses resting on a stack of papers. Her bag is in the corner, and there are photos on her desk. The same picture frames as before, with a few new ones. A big white frame holding a grinning picture of Noah.

His temples are pounding. His hands itch – and he doesn't know if he wants to hit someone or hold her until she somehow forgives him.

She's on the other side of the two-way glass on the far wall. Her office overlooks the interrogation room that doubled as a playroom.

He focuses on it now, ignoring the conversation between Fin and Porter behind him. Her dark head is bent, and without being able to stop himself he moves past the others until he's up against the window. She can't see him, and he's grateful for the reprieve.

_Olivia. _

It's not the first time he's watched her since; he's too fucked up to be able to truly stay away. But this is different. This is their space, their lives, their history. This time she's going to see him back.

Just not yet.

Elliot watches her, and every movement she makes fascinates him. Noah is curled into her on the couch and she's talking to him softly while Lucy sits across the room, waiting. He knows Olivia is explaining why he's here while trying to reassure her son that there is nothing to be afraid of. Her voice will take on that special cadence she saves for children – soft and lulling and even-paced.

Her fingers thread through Noah's light brown curls and Elliot watches as she purses her lips. He knows her, she's trying not to cry. She kisses the top of his head and pulls him closer, and then Noah is saying something. Asking her something.

She half-smiles, but her head is ducked low so he can't see her expression. It's only after she surreptitiously wipes her eye with the back of her hand that she responds to him. Noah must hear a catch in his mother's voice because he suddenly looks up, concerned.

Only she smiles for him, holds his cheeks in her palms and kisses his forehead so that he can't see her pain.

She's always been good at shielding everyone from it.

His pulse has slowed while he watches her. The determination slides back under his skin. He'd had zero right to leave her the way he did, yet back then he'd had less of a right to stay. Every flinch she makes, every breath she's taking – it's so familiar that he loses sense of time. Their history roars in his ears, the sound of it drowning out everything else.

It's there, echoing in his head then. The last text she'd ever sent him, nine years ago.

_I hope you find some peace, El. You've earned it. _

He's watched her enough over the years to know neither one of them has ever found it.

Fin steps into the other room with Olivia and Noah then, and he looks up at the window, knowing Elliot can see him. His expression is flat as he presses the button on the wall. The window instantly goes dark, and he can't see her anymore.

He silently thanks Fin, even though he knows the other man was only shielding Olivia.

Elliot isn't sure he could have handled the look of disgust she will probably wear in the moment Fin tells her who is waiting for her.

Some things he just doesn't want to see.

-o0o- -o0o- -o0o- -o0o-


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: **

Thank you so much for ALL of the feedback, it really does motivate me to write even when I don't think I have it in me. You have no idea the encouragement you've give me. Most importantly thank you for trusting me with them. Mousie, I'm grateful for every convo, text and time you accurately tell me I'm a repetitive goober. Jessica & Eotopia, thank you for the late night reminders that Elliot is sooo sexy (as if I could ever forget)...Not mine, might start a petition.

**Chapter 3**

* * *

She wants her sweater.

She remembers following Fin towards her office, but it's crowded in there now so she stands at the edge of the doorway. She wants her son back in her arms, and even though she knows she has to be here tonight – this is her fault, her problem, hers to solve – she also just wants her oversized black cashmere wrap because she is so, _so_ cold. She wants that warmth around her and then she wants to run somewhere far away with her little boy.

She doesn't want to be here.

She wants. She doesn't want.

It's all wrong, she doesn't know what she wants anymore.

She can _feel_ him, even if she won't look at him. It's been nine years and all she can process is that she's freezing right now. Someone must have turned the heat off.

"Olivia, it's been a long time."

She knows that voice and its one that had never rattled her so she lifts her head up, trying to make eye contact with her former case agent. She will not appear weak or tired or devastated in front of any of them, least of all Dean Porter. "Circumstances like these, it's not long enough," she says quietly, not moving from her spot in the doorway.

She's hyper-aware that _he _is in the far corner, next to her couch. She can't look at him. Not yet. Today has been a barreling freight train and she can't seem to get off the tracks.

She grips the doorframe, thinking she should tell all of them to get out of her office. There are too many of them in such a small space. Rollins is here too, now. Kat is next to Fin. If they'd all leave she could get her sweater around her and just close the door.

_Captain Benson. _

Olivia exhales and closes her eyes, trying to remember the focus techniques she'd learned with Dr. Lindstrom over the last few years. Yes, Elliot is a few feet away, on the peripheral of her vision but she can't let that throw her off her axis. Fin had warned her he was here. He'd told her why and then he'd given her a little time alone in the bathroom while he had protectively waited outside the door.

_He's FBI now, Liv. _

She'd locked herself in a stall for a few minutes, and she had squeezed her eyes shut, letting her forehead touch the cool metal of the door. She had stayed in the stall until the nausea had passed, until she was fairly sure she wouldn't throw up from all of it, and then she'd made her way to the sink. Cold, wet paper towels against her skin had hadn't helped.

He's a few feet away and she's shaking. Maybe she's just shivering.

"Can I have my sweater?" she finds herself asking all of them. And then, before she can stop herself, "It's freezing in here."

It's the look on Fin's face that tells her she's wrong. It's not cold at all. The new heater works overtime in the winter and she's an idiot because how could she forget that?

She has to say something. They're all looking at her like they used to. Back _then_. Seven years ago. She can't ever let that happen again. She's not the victim here.

She knows his eyes are on her too, but she can't look over there to discern what expression he's giving her. No eye contact, not yet. She's not ready for that.

"Just tell me that between all of you, we've reached everyone on my list." Her voice doesn't sound strong, but she doesn't care. At least she's talking, she just has to focus on her son, on the job.

"I talked to Carisi," Amanda interjects. "He's going to my place to be the with the girls, and he's armed. Just leaves Cragen and David Haden."

"Put a detail on your apartment too," she pushes out of her throat.

"Already done."

Olivia nods, but she can't let her guard down. Not until everyone is accounted for and in a safe place. Just making everyone aware that by knowing her they are in danger - it isn't enough. She has to make sure.

_He's safe. _

_In the room. _

_Here. _

There are a thousand ways she could have seen him again that would have been better than this, but at least he's safe. Thank God he's safe.

The alternative is not something she can even touch in her mind. It had been the one consolation over all these years that she's lived without him. At least he wasn't in danger anymore. Wherever he was, he was okay.

He's only a few feet away from her. She swears she can hear him breathing, and she wants to focus on the pace of it. She'll know so much just from the pace. The beat of his breaths. Maybe it's the only sound in the room.

But that's not right, because Dean talking to her, telling her that the Bureau is taking lead on the case and she has to get a grip. The truth is, she wants the help. Ego and ownership have no place here, not when the lives of those she loves are at stake. She can't trust the DA's office or One PP, but she can trust her squad and she wants them involved.

"My team," she hears herself saying. "This unit is involved every step of the way. They know him better than anyone you can bring in. You shut us out, I'll go after him myself."

It's not an empty threat, she thinks. She can hear how on edge she sounds, laying down ultimatums in a voice that doesn't steady. She'd gone after Lewis alone, though. Most of them in the room know what she did and how she did it.

Most of them.

Freezing. The shudders will start if she doesn't -

_Elliot. _

Without thinking, and out of sheer basic instinct, her eyes search him out. He's watching her intently from the far corner of her office, and she notices nothing else, no one else. He's changed too little, she thinks. His eyes. The size of him. The way he stands.

How he looks at her.

She presses her lips together while her fingernails dig into the doorframe again. He's so still, so honed in on her. His eyelashes barely flicker, but his jaw twitches. The awareness slips up her spine, crawls over the back of her neck. Tornadoes, she thinks. They too suck the air out of the room before the destruction comes.

Someone – she thinks its Rollins – says they are going to get her a coffee.

Elliot finally shifts his stance, but he doesn't take his eyes off her.

There are a million things that want to pour out of her, confessions and anger and pain and the shuddering ache that suddenly reverberates though her. It's numbing and terrifying that just by looking at him she can feel that metal bar in her hands again, even though it's been almost seven years. In the years since it had become his bar; he'd been the one to wield it. She'd needed him there, so she'd become him.

It petrifies her that just by seeing Elliot the landmines of Lewis are active inside of her again.

She can't go there. Not tonight. Not when she's lost her brother and Ed, when she'd cost them everything. No one else can die; she can't take it anymore. She's lost too many people in too many ways. It has to stop. Once and for all, it has to stop.

The here and now. _Focus. _

She thinks that she heard Dean agree to the joint effort between the Bureau and her squad, and she's grateful she doesn't have to fight for it. She has to save what little energy she has left for all of the other battles to come. Her phone is on her desk and it starts ringing now, right as Fin's starts beeping. The sound jars her, and she starts to make her way to her desk, leaning over it to reach for her device. She's shaky, and she almost fumbles the phone out of her grasp. The magnitude of what is happening on every front crowds in on her and she wills her phone not to slip out of her hand as she tries to answer it.

Only Fin reaches her first, his hand circling around her wrist and pushing her hand down. Her phone keeps ringing and the horror of what is happening now starts to crawl over her.

He'd seen his phone first. He's stopping her for a reason.

She looks up at Fin's face and she knows. She can't move, not when the shaking is this bad. "No," she whispers. _"No."_

Two more phones go off in the room, and then she hears Porter. Because he is who he is, he doesn't spare anyone the name. "Former ADA. Haden. DOA. Burglary in Hell's Kitchen_."_

_David. _

_No, no, no. _

_No!_

The walls close in and her chest constricts so badly she can't breathe. She can't lose it in front of an audience, but she's only got seconds. The cold has given way to a full-body sweat because they'd all assumed they had more time. Days, at the very least. Simon and Ed's deaths were months apart, no one was expecting two in the same week. No one.

This job has taken enough. Too much. It just takes and takes and takes.

_Now David. _

Olivia's fingers flatten against her lips because she can't make a sound. She needs space and no one is moving. They're all the just waiting, they'll see too much.

She can't crumble. She feels like she's going to suffocate and the light in the room is dotted with pinpricks of darkness. Her chest is being crushed, and she can't get air. She cannot goddamn breathe.

Then she hears it.

"Everyone out. _Now."_

She closes her eyes. It's Elliot's low, commanding voice after all of these years and of course this is what it's used for. She tries to anchor herself to the bone deep familiarity of it. The grief is coming, it's bubbling up in her lungs and she's not going to be able to stop it.

_I'm so sorry, David_.

For some reason they must all listen to him, because in seconds they're all out of her office, her door is closed, and her chair is being pulled behind her before she's sinking into it. Collapsing over herself, elbows on her knees, hands in her face and it's here. The agony of losing so much. The nearly violent wave of guilt that overwhelms her because she costs the people she cares about too much.

Her circle had been small. And now…

"Olivia, look at me."

His voice pulls at her as if it has a will of its own.

He's crouching in front of her, his hands gripping the armrests on either side of her body. If she just concentrates on his eyes she can slip back in time. The flecks are the same, because it all is. The intensity of the blue and how it darkens, how his eyelashes close just a little bit when he's reading her.

Nine years._ Years._

She'd never blamed him, the anger had always been everyone else's. He'd never really been hers; she'd had no right to keep him here. She knows why he had to leave her once and for all.

Still.

_He's FBI now, Liv. _

"This is not your fault." His voice is rough but gentle, coaxing her to hear him. "We're going to get this sonofabitch and you're going to make him pay, okay? We're not going to stop until he's done. We'll finish him."

She listens to his tone, feels his open hand come to rest against the side of her head, the way he's got her hair bunched up and her face is wet because one night should only be so much.

This night has been a thousand hells.

She should be focused on his unimaginable absence, but in this moment she's gripped by his presence. He's alive. He's okay and here and he's –

"Elliot."

It falls out of her then, the impossibility of all of it. Time is either endless or non-existent and in this moment her grief is too powerful for anything else between them to be reckoned with. Her shoulders are shaking with the effort of trying to contain it but she's losing the battle.

_David, I'm so sorry. _The apologies within her are endless.

"I'm here."

Olivia closes her eyes then because his words are garish in their irony and they have no business being reassuring and it's all too much to deal with. She hears herself start to cry before she even realizes what she's doing. She leans forward and he's around her, and she vaguely knows in any other moment she would have never,_ ever_ let him do this again.

Her fingers slide up beneath his arms, clutching at the leather of his jacket. She inhales the scent of it, absorbs the heat of him. She can feel the rigid expanse of his shoulder beneath her eyelids and the cracks start to fissure in her chest. Tonight has been far too much give and too little take.

He holds her head against his shoulder and lets her let go.

She cries fully then, maybe in the only place she ever really would.

-o0o-

* * *

The squad room is filled with people he doesn't know.

NYPD, FBI, the DA's office. Agents and and officers, detectives and the brass. He's learned their names fast – those who are on the case and those who have descended simply in support of Olivia.

Former ADA Barba, Deputy Chief Garland, Bureau Chief Hadid. Former Chief Dodds - his son had been killed while part of the unit – and since Rollins' daughters had been brought in out of an abundance of caution, ADA Carisi is now here, too.

Cassidy is UC right now, so he won't be showing up. For that, Elliot is grateful. He doesn't think he can handle seeing that fucker tonight. How he'd ever believed Cassidy that night in the hospital, he doesn't know. But he blames that asshole for ever letting him think that Olivia was better off -

"We still don't have a location on Cragen," Porter says under his breath.

They are listening to ASAC Holmes and Chief Garland divide the room into a manhunt. Or at least he's supposed to be listening. He can't focus on anything but Olivia.

Until now. His gut turns hard. "Where the fuck is he? Last known?"

"2 miles southeast off the coast of Port St. Lucie. His wife said he left yesterday on a fishing trip. She said he goes off grid sometimes, always comes back in 72 hours. He had a buddy with him and no one has heard from them since."

_His wife? _Jesus he's missed too much. His head is pounding, and he can't shake the feeling of holding her. "When will they send up choppers?"

"Winds are rough tonight, not until the morning."

"Don't tell Olivia that. Tell her no one is worried yet. Tell her he's regularly unreachable." His own stomach is churning at the possibilities, but he'll be damned if she needs one more thing on her plate right now.

She'd fucking cried on him. He should never have been allowed to touch her again, but she'd let him clear the room and then she'd just given herself over and trusted him to hang on.

He doesn't have time for a migraine right now.

She's keeps unconsciously rubbing her own arms as she stands up near his ASAC and Garland, doing her best to interject insight or add background information when she can. But it doesn't take their history to see her devastation right now. Everyone in the room can see the red swell of her eyes, hear the rasp when she talks. He notices the little things too – the slight sway every few minutes, the way she chews her lips when her eyes start to water.

The way she looks at him sometimes.

Across the room, across everyone else she still looks for him every few minutes. Her glance darts away quickly each time, but he knows she's making sure he's still here. Like hell he will be anywhere else ever again. He knows her anger is coming, maybe she will even tell him to get lost.

But for the moment she's stunningly simply accepting him.

Elliot exhales and shifts his stance, growing more uncomfortable by the minute. The plan being laid out won't work. They have no time for a manhunt, even as a joint task force. There's no time for forensics to go over his financials. There's no time to deal with the TSA, Border Patrol or FAA. If Moore feels like they are closing in on him, he will only up the game. He will change tactics and burrow his own ass deeper to save himself while he sets chaotic and terrifying wheels in motion.

A guy like Moore will grow more unpredictable the more he is cornered. Right now he's going after the men Olivia cares about. If the noose tightens, there's nothing to stop him from going after the women, the kids.

There's nothing to stop him from going directly for Olivia and he's got the reach and resources to do it.

There's no hunting a Jackal. Every instinct in Elliot's body knows it. Not even the reach of the FBI will be able to catch him before someone else goes down.

He's confident about what needs to happen, and this is all a waste of time.

"This is all wrong." He says it loudly without thinking of consequence or procedure. He doesn't care about the higher ups or protocol. He'd come back to the job on his terms; he'll leave again if the terms are no longer his. "He can't be hunted. He has to be baited."

Every head in the room turns to him. Next to him, Porter swears irritably under his breath.

He looks only at Olivia, willing her to inhale because she had immediately paled. He knows why. Her instincts are the same as his, so she knows he's right. She just doesn't want him to voice what they both know.

"Stabler-" ASAC Holmes stops then and rubs his hand down his face. He's dealt with Elliot's temper too often and the wariness is all over his expression. He's praying his pain-in-the-ass agent will shut up.

Fat chance.

"I'll bait him," Elliot offers, widening his stance and folding his arms over his chest. "Use me."

The room goes dead silent. He doesn't care. Instead he's only watching the way she blinks and how the color comes back into her cheeks. She's finally getting really angry now, and that's good. That's where she needs to be.

"No," Olivia says firmly, finding her voice. "No goddamned way. We can find him. He's at a disadvantage because he's too recognizable."

"Let him come for me." Elliot's conviction is growing. He knows this is the right thing, the only way. It's the one fucking thing he can do.

"You been gone nine years, Stabler. What the hell makes you think he's gonna see you as important to Olivia at all?" Fin says, his words sharp and challenging from across the room.

As much as he appreciates Fin being a constant for Olivia, this is where he's going to make everyone else back down. "We make him believe I matter to her. Liv goes about her life starting tonight, only I'm in it now. Publicly. We make a show of it. I'll stay with her."

"No."

Every head turns to Olivia, drawn by the absolute, solid conviction in her voice for the first time. Only he's never been afraid of challenging her in this room. He's going to make her see it his way no matter what he has to do. He knows he's right. So does she. "You want to keep your head on a swivel until he takes everyone else out and comes for Noah? You're going to risk your son?"

"You _sonofabitch_," she hisses.

He knows they have an audience, but that's never mattered to either of them. He knows what he's doing because he knows her. "We go public, Olivia. Starting tonight. I showed up to comfort you over Simon and Haden." He clears his throat. "Tucker." Fuck it to high hell, he'd known about _that_ but it doesn't make acknowledging it out loud it any easier. He's still got two scars on his right ribcage he earned on the night he'd found out she was letting Tucker even damned breathe on her. "If he's done his homework – which we know he has – he'll get the history and come for me next."

"Stabler, that's enough." It's Holmes who finally cuts him off. "I'm not against baiting him, but I don't like the idea of you and Captain Benson being open targets. He's farmed out the hits, so even if we catch the hit in progress, there's nothing to say we can trace it back."

Elliot finally grins. He knows he's got his ASAC on board despite the pushback. "That's the thing about hit men. They can all be bought. It's the nature of the business. So long as we keep whoever it is that comes after me alive, we'll get access to Moore."

"And what if it's not a person who comes after you, Elliot?" Olivia is seething now, and he's grateful for it. She's going to ride a rollercoaster of emotion, but out of all of them this is the one that will propel her in the fight. "Who's to say it's not a car bomb? A traffic accident?"

The room is silent, but by the look on his ASAC's face, Elliot knows he's about to win simply due to jurisdiction at this point. He focuses on Olivia and uses what he's been briefed on, but he keeps his voice low because what he's about to say is going to sting. "Someone was in the room with Simon, Olivia. He'd been clean for years, right? They couldn't count on him picking up a needle simply due to habit, someone forced him do it. Same for Tucker. Haden they walked right up to him. They'll come for me too if they think it will get to you."

She's flinches, and she then blinks as if he's hurt her. _Fuck_, that's never been his intention. Ever.

"We're not risking that," she finally says softly. "No."

ASAC Holmes clears his throat. "With all due respect, Captain. That's not your call. With the likelihood that Moore is out of state, this case is ours now, and what Agent Stabler suggests has merit. It doesn't preclude us from tracking Moore's movements at the same time, but quickly drawing his attention to Stabler means we might minimize the threat to anyone else, including your son."

Olivia rubs her hands over her face then, and Elliot focuses solely on her as his ASAC and Porter take the room. He hears them arranging for a protective detail for Olivia's apartment and he doesn't care who they assign, because she's not going to be out of his sight for a minute until this is over.

She suddenly looks tired now. The fire is gone from her eyes and her gaze has moved to the door of the playroom where Noah and Lucy remain with Amanda Rollins' two daughters and their nanny. Her breathing has slowed and she's fading out as she watches the door.

He knows she is tuning the room out now too, which is fine because it's all logistics at this point and the personnel in the room are starting to break up into smaller groups.

He's making his way over to her before anyone can interrupt him. She won't look at him, even when he's standing directly in front of her.

"Why are you doing this?" Olivia finally whispers, still avoiding his face.

He has years of explanations. Years of faults and nightmares and regrets that have lived like acid beneath his skin. Being this close to her after all this time is too much and not enough. He can't shake the painful familiarity of just being here in this squad room, as if nine years never existed.

"Liv-"

She raises her eyes to him, and they are darker and blanker than he remembers them. The nine years exist completely within them, and he can see too much of those years in the defeat she wears. "What about Noah?"

He chews on his lower lip, praying she accepts what he's going to say. He drops his voice, willing her to just hear him out. "Kathy and Eli, they're at the Meritage Hotel on 46th. The Bureau took connecting suites there and no one at NYPD is privy to that. Noah and Lucy should go there. Same with your Detective and her daughters. We've got guys and eyes on the door, the floor, the lobby and a direct line of sight from across the street. They're safest there."

Olivia's eyes fill. "He's safest with me." It's empty though, as if she's already calculated the risks and realized that she's wrong.

He softens his approach, knowing that giving up proximity to her child is shaking her. "No, Liv. Not right now he isn't." Her exhaustion is palpable and he knows she hasn't had time to process anything of the last few hours. "Let my guys take him there. Send your detective. Between her and Lucy and Kathy, he'll be okay."

But she's shaking her head, as if willing the reality of being separated from Noah away.

"Olivia. I'm trusting my son and my children's mother to these agents. I'm not asking you to risk anything I'm not risking. You just…gotta trust me on this."

It was the wrong thing to say. "Trust you?" Olivia's chin lifts and her frustration is directed at him, even as she keeps her voice down. "I don't even know you anymore."

It cuts deep and fast, but he deserves it. He can't let her shake his resolve. They are a lot of things, but they are not strangers. No amount of time apart will change that. He still knows her instincts better than he knows his own. He suspects it's the same for her.

"You really believe that?" he asks gently.

He's met with silence.

He knows the idea of letting her son out of her sight is the worst of what she is facing right now. "I want to be the one to take him there," she says quietly.

"You know that's not a good idea."

She covers her mouth with her hand, containing her reaction yet again. He knows she's going to break again soon so he steps even closer to her, dropping his mouth is near her ear. "Get Moore with me. The sooner we catch the bastard, the sooner Noah is home with you. You and I? We can get him. Make him pay."

Olivia closes her eyes then as if she's absorbing what he's saying. She's breathing too hard and he can see the trembling she is trying to control.

After a few long moments, she gives him the answer he's looking for.

Almost imperceptibly, she nods.

-o0o-


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: **Oh boy, they make me hurt. I've been listening to Be Still by The Fray, if you need music as I do when I write. J - thank you for going at this chapter hard and showing me how to make it better. Love you. Thank you everyone for the reviews, they make my life and make me want to quit my day job and just dive deep into this. Thanks for trusting me with them. 3

* * *

**Chapter 4**

She stands just on the inside of the door to his apartment, unwilling to immerse herself any deeper into his life. His apartment is nineteen blocks south of hers, and it's just one more thing on the list of the unimaginable things today has brought.

For years, he has been walking distance from her.

At some point she will process that, but right now she's too numb to comprehend anything more. Especially anything that has to do with him, or any of _this. _

It's still raining out, and she shivers in her wet coat and heels as she leans back against the door. It's been hours since Ed's funeral, but she's still wearing the miserable black dress. Elliot is in his bedroom changing now, and she's vaguely aware that she too wants her own warm clothes.

What she really wants is Noah. She wants to take him home, curl into bed with him and sleep against the perfect scent of his hair. As it is her son is in a hotel suite with her ex-partner's ex-wife and that's another level of messed up that she just can't process.

She closes her eyes now against the invasive light flooding his apartment. When they had first walked in, he'd flipped every switch on and cleared three rooms before holstering his gun. He'd held a weapon she is no longer familiar with. Years ago they used to go to the range together, switching weapons so that they were as proficient and accurate with the other's gun as they were with their own. Just in case they found themselves in that situation one day in the future.

They'd once made contingency plans that they hadn't needed. She hadn't known there wouldn't be a future for them to worry about.

He's only here to change and grab some clothes and his go bag, but even the few minutes here are enough for her to see too much.

There are framed photos of his kids that sit on the coffee table, the end table. Even from here she can see how they've grown, become adults. Maureen is in photos with a dark-haired man, there are images of Richard tossing Eli around. Olivia wraps her arms around her waist, trying to stop the shaking. Her eyes scan the rest of the photos. Kathleen in front of some building that looks like it might be in Europe, Elizabeth in a black cap and gown.

There's another photo in a white wooden frame on the far table. She's freezing again as she looks across the room at it. She doesn't need to be close to know what that one is.

It's a picture of them. How they'd been. She'd laughed too much one night after a case, when the squad had been out having beers to celebrate a rare win. It's grainy because their phone cameras hadn't had great resolution back then, but she'd leaned into him, nearly knocking him off his feet. He had grinned, one hand bracing her as Fin had snapped the image. They hadn't been afraid to touch each other yet.

He'd taken that framed picture with him after one of their last cases together. They'd had to pretend to be a married couple buying an infant. They'd staged a brownstone with old photos showing their life together, hoping to convince the trafficker that it was their marital home.

Her temples throb. She has to quiet the history of them in her head.

She wants to leave. She's too tired, too overwhelmed. This day has been endless, and now that Deputy Chief Garland and Holmes have taken command of her case, there's nothing more she can do other than just go home for the night, as they'd instructed.

Only he's been ordered into her home with her.

There will be no crying tonight. She won't let Elliot hear her tears for Simon, for Ed. For David. She won't give in to her fear for Cragen. Her terror for her son. She won't let Elliot watch her break again, despite how badly she needs to just let it all out.

He comes out of the bedroom now, shutting off the light while carrying two duffel bags. She can't look at him. There are hardened changes to him that she's already processed, but it is unsettling that too much is still familiar all the way into her bones.

"You ready?" He keeps his voice low and calm, and his easy control is almost infuriating.

His voice, that's one of the familiar things. How he stands too close. That's another.

"Just let me have a night to myself," she says, trying to keep her words steady. "I need-" but she stops herself. "Forget it." She knows it's impossible. Moore isn't going to take a night off, so neither can she. Neither can any of them.

Her needs are a waste of words.

She retreats, deliberately giving him a blank stare.

He drops his bags near her feet, and she feels cornered between the heat coming off him and the solid door behind her. "Tell me."

The chill is in her blood now. She'd wanted to go to the crime scene to see David, but they'd stopped her. She'd needed to stay with Noah - they made it clear her presence would only endanger him. She wants to go home alone, and she's faced with Elliot being in her space after so long.

There's nothing in her control, so she doesn't say anything. She feels the fight drain from her.

"Olivia, this isn't on you. None of it."

She doesn't care that he can still read her, the weight of the collective loss is devastating. She can't even begin to open the Pandora's box of fear that is unfurling within her chest because he is trying to use himself as bait.

The unimaginables tonight just keep piling up, again and again and again.

She raises her eyes to his, unable to say anything. Her irises burn. He's so close, and it's been so damned long that she wants to both cry for the comfort and rage at the pain, but she doesn't have the energy for either one of those responses. She focuses on the tiger-flecked blue of his eyes, the flicker of his eyelashes.

Elliot looks at her for too long. He's immovable. She knows that years don't matter, he still sees too much all at once.

"You can hate me," he says softly.

"I don't." She responds too quickly, and the rush of air it takes makes her shudder. She gives him the truth. She can't hate him for needing to be gone from her. She was a reminder yet again of another night gone horribly wrong. She'd been that for her mother, she would have never let it come to that for them.

He'd ghosted her. She'd understood.

His gaze is unrelenting. His eyes narrow and he probably doesn't realize that he's crowding her. She needs him to back up and just give her a few feet of space at all times.

"I should have been there." It's the way he says it that crushes her. It's the implications, the self-recriminations. It's the roughness of his words that tells her the sheer depth of them. They both know exactly who and what he's talking about it and it's more than she can handle tonight.

At least he already knows, so she won't ever have to be the one to tell him.

Olivia can't look at him, so she ducks her head. She focuses on the fact that her clothes are still wet. Her feet hurt. Her skin, it's covered in unforgiving goosebumps.

But in the face of her silence, he lowers his chin and doubles down. "I should have been there, Olivia."

Rougher still, and her throat locks. There is a well inside of her of things she needs to give over to him, things she's saved in the depths of her psyche for too many years. But it's not the time or the place, and it's too late anyway. In truth, she's buried too much of it too deep to ever examine it again.

"It doesn't matter," she whispers.

He's so close to her that despite the grief, the anger, the pain – her skin starts to finally warm. That's the only reason she doesn't protest when he steps even closer and stands up straight, until his mouth nearly brushes her forehead.

The years have blurred all the lines.

"It matters, Liv." His hands ever so lightly skim her arms, and she can feel him talking against her skin. She wants to grip his shirt and absorb his heat but she won't. She can't.

"I'm fine."

He steps back then, cocks his head a little and bends lower until she has no choice but look him in the eyes. "Yeah? Then that makes one of us."

She feels dizzy and too lightheaded to face down his sarcasm right now. She'd been at the end of her rope after the funeral hours ago, with no idea that her hell was just starting. She hadn't awakened that morning with any idea that today would be the day it would all come crashing down.

That today would be the day she would see Elliot again.

After all these years, she needed some warning. Some time to prepare herself, to comprehend it.

Then again David hadn't known what today held, either. She's got no right to question how much pain one day could deliver. Her head starts to throb, and it occurs to her that she doesn't know who will tell David's ex-wife. His children. It's not her place to go, but she's cost them everything too and the realization sends a new wave of nausea through her veins.

Elliot is standing inches from her, his hands on her arms and his eyes searching hers. He's got a badge that is different from hers and he's edgier, more chiseled if that's possible. There is a darkness in him now that hadn't been there before and she thinks _yes, me too. _

"Are you done packing?" she finally asks, trying to moisten her lips and break the literal hold he has on her. "My place, it's nineteen-"

"Blocks north of here," he finishes for her.

Her gaze flies to his. "You-"

But he cuts her off again. "Don't ask that yet, Liv."

She thinks maybe she's supposed to be angry or push him away. Maybe she's supposed to be so furious she yells. Maybe she's supposed to shove him away from her and tell him he's fucked up for knowing things about her when his absence has been a black hole in her life, devoid of any details. But the day has been too gray, the night too dark. She rubs her palm across her forehead, then over her closed eyes, trying to clear her mind.

He knows where she lives and far beneath the layers of her skin, she knows that he didn't just read it in a file somewhere. She should call him a coward for never actually showing up, but she's too tired to confront him tonight,

She doesn't look at him, she just shifts uncomfortably against the door. "How long?"

There's a long pause, an expelling of air. And then, "Since you moved in."

Over six and a half years ago.

Ever since.

She's going to break again, and she cares less about what is coming now than she did in her office. But she has to know. It's imperative that she knows. "How many times." Its flat, hollow. Not a question.

"Can't count."

_Blink your lights when you get upstairs. _

A lifetime ago. And still.

She can feel his punctuated breath hitting her skin. She's different again, just by this. It's the other half of her in the room with them again. The _before_ of her. The before of him. There are so many versions of them in the room all at once.

He'd watched her.

She wants to scream at him that he's sick but the truth is that the relief viciously comes barreling out of nowhere. It explodes across her skin, her chest, her fingertips. It cascades down her spine, floods across her shoulders. It's almost painful, as if her limbs had all fallen asleep and the pricking awareness is circling back through every inch too damned fast.

She had spent so many nights believing he had wholly erased her from his life. But he hadn't washed his life of her. He hadn't given up, boxed her up. Stored her away. He hadn't seen the news for those horrific days and simply thought _not my problem anymore._

Her thoughts are jumbled as they come at her. Shock, she thinks. She's been battling it all day.

She sees David spilling out onto a sidewalk because that's what they had told her, and Simon's blue lips on Melinda's table, and then there's Ed and it had been a closed casket today and everyone had known why.

It's all coming at her then, the moments she so desperately wanted to forget. Her wrists bound, the chemical plastic smell of the tarp over her, a gunshot and a body smacking the back door of the car before it hit the ground. Her stomach turns recalling the smell of raw burning flesh, and it might be hers, it needs to be hers because there are too many other people dying and it's all her fault. It's _Welcome home, Detective Benson_, the soundtrack of his voice that starts up again after all this time, repeating itself in her head over and over.

Elliot had watched her.

"El," comes out of her and its strangled. It's not his full name, and that's an admission that scorches her throat when she says it.

He steps into her then and his hands are in her hair for the second time tonight. He gathers her up that way, her forehead pulled against his lips and she doesn't care if its been nine days or nine years because there will be time for all of that later. Her eyes well and if she could just, just_ please _hold it together right now that's all she would ask of whatever God exists up there.

"Fuck," he grates. "Liv."

She presses her face into his neck then and one of his hands slides down her back. She's gripping his coat and he's gripping hers and he's whispering something incoherent and maybe, just maybe if she stays like this she will open her eyes to find out he's only been gone minutes after all.

That's it, that's what she tells herself as she inhales the scent of him hard, willing away the effects of shock and exhaustion. The rough skin of his neck rasps against her face, and for just a moment, Jenna is somewhere on the floor nearby, they both know she's gone.

This is it, she pretends. In the aftermath he hadn't run.

In the aftermath, she imagines, this is what they had both done.

-o0o-

* * *

For the first time tonight he takes a deep breath. Or maybe that's wrong. Maybe it's the first time in years he's really used his lungs like this.

He's trying not to pry in her apartment, but while she's showering he has too much freedom. There were too many nights he'd sat in his car, watching the lights of these windows, just wondering.

Now he's in her space, and fuck, he's just got to breathe.

Two bags of Chinese takeout sit on the kitchen counter – he'd insisted – but they sit next to a basket of fresh fruit, a pile of markers, a pair of children's mittens and a half-eaten bowl of kids cereal. The shelves along the wall are filled with children's books, a truck, photos and Noah's artwork. There's a magnet on the fridge holding a permission slip for a museum trip from Noah's school, and a newly started puzzle is scattered across the coffee table.

The bare cupboards and sterility of her old apartment is long gone. She'd found a life and built herself a family without him around, and he's examined that far too often. Then again, he also knows why she moved here in the first place and that's something he hasn't ever been able to process.

_I've got this, Stabler. Do her a favor. Turn around and disappear so you give her a fucking chance! You can't do shit to fix this! Look at you, you're a goddamned mess. You think she needs that? _

She'd moved in here with Cassidy four months after that night he'd shown up at the hospital. He'd taken it as a sign that Cassidy had been right. With him out of her life, she'd found a relationship, and she had support.

After he'd left the squad, his marriage had steadily crumbled along with everything else. The week before Lewis had taken Olivia, Kathy had finally asked for a divorce for the last time and he'd let that be the nail in the coffin he'd occupied since he'd killed Jenna. Half-drunk, he'd holed up in a motel for a few days with some Xanax to quell Jenna's surprised face and Kathy's blank one.

He'd surfaced to hear the news droning in the motel room. Words that took far too long to become clear. The NYPD had recovered their missing detective.

He hadn't showered or shaved. The first press conference had taken place from the hospital, so he'd had an address and he'd been out the door before the news segment was over.

He'd gone off-grid for two months after the confrontation that night with Cassidy at hospital.

His phone rings, so he grabs it and finds a place on the couch. He's avoided this call so far, and he doesn't deserve the space his ex-wife has given him tonight. She'd been a police wife for long enough that she'd stayed out of his way until now, and he owes her something. Anything.

"Kath."

"I'm just checking on you."

That's who she is. How she is these days. He'd scared all of them so badly after the shooting all those years ago that she just seems be happy when he's holding it all together for the most part. "I'm fine. How're you and Eli? Liz?"

She chuckles quietly, but there's an edge to it. "None of the kids are happy about the surveillance on them, but I'm glad for it. The more the better. Liz is staying at Kathleen's. Eli thinks this is a vacation."

He scrubs his hand over his face more than once. "I'm sorry."

"They won't tell me much, Elliot. Just that someone is after Olivia and they are taking precautions. I'm assuming you're in danger too?"

He can't answer that. He can't tell the mother of his children that he'd just offered himself up as the primary bait to draw out a killer. Then again she is used to not hearing from him for days during the undercovers. She already lives in a constant state of wondering if he's alive or dead.

He wonders the same thing sometimes. "I'm fine. You'll be okay there. Just don't ask to leave or push boundaries. Please. We'll have to tell Eli's school he's on vacation."

"I already emailed them." Her breathing is heavy, and he can tell she's debating her next words. After the things he's said and done, she shouldn't ever have to tiptoe around him. "He's a beautiful boy, Elliot. Noah, I mean. He just went to sleep in the other room with Lucy about an hour ago, but Eli took a liking to him."

He scrubs his hand down his face. There's no limit to things he asks of her, yet she isn't giving him any anger or frustration despite the fact that he'd just turned her life upside down. Again. He's silent, but she doesn't let that deter her even though he can hear the exhaustion in her voice.

"Tell her I'll take good care of him. Tell her…I owe her and I wish it wasn't under these circumstances, but I'm glad to get to know him."

Her tone has become more delicate over the last few years. She always chooses her words carefully with him, so he knows this is important. "Owe her?"

It's a soft, sad laugh. "She took care of Eli and I through the crash. And," Kathy pauses, as if searching for the right words. "She took care of you better than I could. Look what happened when all of you was left to only me."

"Kath-" He closes his eyes. "I was lost without the job."

The long moments stretch out. He can hear his ex-wife breathing, shifting on the bed she must be laying on. "Not just the job. How're you taking it? Seeing her?"

He can't do this. Not tonight. Not when he's got no idea of what the next moment is going to bring with Olivia. There are no explanations that will make sense.

"She hasn't killed me herself yet, if that's what you're asking."

He imagines her there, in a hotel suite with children she doesn't know, with federal agents watching her every move. She hasn't killed him either, and he doesn't deserve her patience. Maybe he never has.

"She won't," Kathy finally says gently. "Keep yourself safe. Olivia safe. Okay? Night, Elliot."

He's still holding his phone when the line clicks. A second later he realizes the shower must have been off for a little while, because Olivia's bedroom door opens.

She's standing there then in her bare feet, wrapped in a big white robe. Her hair is wet and her face is scrubbed free of the last bit of makeup. Her eyes are redder than they had been, and he realizes she'd spent the extra time in there crying.

She looks fragile. Softer than he ever remembers her.

Olivia remains there, as if she doesn't know what to do with herself. She shoves her hands into the pockets of the robe. "I'm going to sleep in Noah's room. You can have mine. The bathroom connects between them, so I'll close the bathroom door on my side and if you want to shower…" Her voice trails off, and she looks off towards the kitchen, jutting her chin out. "There are clean towels on the counter."

It's all perfunctory, emotionless.

"I'm not taking your room, Liv." There's no way he's going to waltz in here and slide into her bed. He needs some sleep at some point and that's no way to try and get it.

She blinks at him. "I need Noah's room."

The emptiness in her voice makes him drop the sleeping arrangements.

He gets up, making his way to her despite the wariness in her expression as she turns to watch him approach. "Kathy called. She said Noah's doing great. He and Eli are getting along. Kids went to sleep about-"

"Yeah," she interrupts. "I talked to Lucy." Every word is hollow.

"Liv, you gotta eat something. Gonna have a long day tomorrow." He makes his way into the kitchen and he can feel her eyes on him. He reaches for the Chinese and starts unpacking the bags.

She doesn't move an inch. "I can't. I'm good. Just gonna call it a night. Just wake me if you hear that Don is safe."

He doesn't want her panicking about Cragen right before bed, so he ignores her. He's going to check in with Porter on that search anyway after she goes to sleep. "Just try some of the soup at least. A full stomach will help you sleep. I'll pour you a bowl of it." He's moving too fast, opening the cupboards to find a bowl and spoon.

"I can't, Elliot."

But she's so still and quiet that it scares the hell out of him. Fuck. He finds what he's looking for and starts opening the container.

"Stop, _please_."

He finally stills, looking to his left at her. Her eyes have that sheen again and she looks lost in her own home. "Liv, just have a little."

She shakes her head then, the void deepening. "You can't do this, Elliot. You don't get to come in here and tell me what to do. I'm not angry, I'm not. I just can't do _this _either."

She's right. He doesn't have any rights here, at all. She hasn't given him the anger he knows he deserves yet, but that doesn't give him any leeway when it comes to her personal space in the meantime.

But his hands have touched her today, and all he wants is the chance to do it again.

"You're right," he gives her, reluctantly.

She seems a little relieved, as if the panic that she would have to fight him has receded. "I know we have two details outside but," she hesitates, swallowing as if her throat is sore. "You should know every room has a panic button. Goes straight to the squad and Fin. The blue ones on the wall. The windows are resistant acrylic but stay away from them anyway. Front door and the bedroom doors are reinforced and I'm setting the perimeter alarm now, so if you need to go out, let me know."

She'd described the fortress she'd constructed for her and Noah in a monotone. As if it's perfectly normal to live in a virtual bunker. She doesn't give him the alarm code, and he doesn't question it.

It makes his skin crawl that she'd felt the need to live like this. As if she couldn't trust the outside world to keep her or her child safe. The truth is, she isn't wrong.

He's fucking failed her in a thousand ways.

He stands perfectly still as she opens the fridge and takes out two bottles of water. She puts on one on the counter in front of him and then steps back, recreating her perimeter of space. "There's one other thing." She doesn't look at him. Instead she fidgets, opening the water bottle and shifting a little. Olivia finally thinks better of it and starts to walk out of the room, stopping only when she's almost in the hallway, one hand gripping the edge of the wall and the other holding her water.

Her back is to him when she speaks. "I talk sometimes. In my sleep. I take something to help with that most nights, so that I don't wake Noah. But I don't…want to be even the slightest bit groggy while this case is going so," She finally looks back over her shoulder. "If you hear me, I'm okay." Her flat, empty eyes lift to his. "I don't need rescuing."

She disappears around the corner then, and he doesn't follow her.

He can't move, frozen in place by the matter-of-fact admission and fully without an appetite too. For all the nights he'd sat outside and watched the lights in this apartment, he hadn't truly understood the depths of hell she'd been fighting within.

Alone.


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: **

Thank you all SO much for the reviews, the support, the incredible feedback. Every single one of them makes a difference and is so encouraging. Thank you Mousie, for always being there to hold me accountable. xoxo

**Chapter 5**

The water lashes his face and the nausea makes him want to roll over and vomit again.

By the violent rocking beneath him, he knows he's still on the boat.

He's been laying in this cesspool of blood and bile for god only knows how long. He's been out of it more than his pride cares to admit, but he's seen the sun rise once since the attack so he knows it's been more than a day at the very least.

He starts coughing, the fire in his lungs nearly an inferno. It's dark as hell again out here on the water, and the rain batters his aching body. He knows he's lost a decent amount of blood, so he's got to open his mouth and absorb whatever water he can because he's not strong enough to go below deck and find the water bottles. He squeezes his eyes shut to try and clear the fog; he can't give in to the void again.

He tries to peel his eyes open again as he catches some of the water on his tongue, but they refuse to open now. It's black all around him, ominous and loud, the ocean twisting and turning. His left hand feels like he'd dipped it in lava and –

His _hand._

His arm is crossed over his chest because he'd been cradling it even as he'd laid here unconscious. He tries to form a fist and nearly vomits again from the pain. The boat dips and turns, anchored in place despite the anger of the Atlantic.

His fingers. Some of them feel like they are gone, he just doesn't know how many. He remembers trying to tie them off with the strap from the life vest. He'd managed to cut the nylon strap off with the knife from the survival pack, fighting the blackness every second of the way. He'd tied his fingers together so tightly that he's sure whatever is left of them is dead now.

_Kenny. _

He'd watched the impact throw Kenny off the back and into the water, and he'd killed the engine immediately, ignoring the fate of the jet skier that had shockingly hit them hard and fast. Rescuing his friend was first. Kenny was nearing seventy-eight and he wasn't a big guy. He'd been standing close enough to the edge of the boat that he'd gone over instantly. The collision had thrown him hard, and his friend had gurgled in surprise, the water turning red around the boat too damned fast in the seconds before he had been able to kill the blades of the underwater motor.

He hadn't had time to do more than try reach for him before he'd realized his friend was sinking too quickly. He'd jumped over, determined to pull Kenny back onboard but the water had been so dark with blood that he hadn't been able to see him.

That's when he had realized the jet skier hadn't been on the vessel when it had hit. The black wet-suit clad skier had jumped him from behind in the water, a serrated fishing knife in hand and doing everything he could to slice into his skin. He'd worn a mask, and he had been agile, pushing down on his back to hold him under as he'd swung the knife in front and around his neck.

He had fought him, grabbing the knife in a last defensive measure as he kicked to keep his head above water. He'd felt the sear of shock across his fingers, felt the pull of the water. He'd known then that he wouldn't win the battle. For some reason the jet skier had been on the attack, coming around front of him in the water where his blue eyes had glittered with determination.

None of it had made sense. It had been a perfect January afternoon until then. He had realized they had been targeted. There was nothing on the boat to rob, yet the ambush had come at them fast and violent. He remembers thinking about how the air had still been warm, but the water had been too cold to be in it long and he'd been at a disadvantage without a wetsuit or weapon.

He groans in pain now, fighting the blackness as he tries to catalog the details, knowing he will need to relay them if he survives. The attacker had brought the knife up yet he had managed to hold it away from his face, feeling it slice through his hand and seeing the water turn a thick crimson. Kenny was gone, he'd realized, and now –

Spinner sharks. Behind the attacker, he remembers two fins lurking forty feet out, drawing closer towards them, lured by the promise of the blood-saturated water. It was the right time of year, that's the only reason they were this far out from the shore. They were migrating south from the Carolinas.

The insane improbability of the attack had nearly sent him into stunned shock, and he had felt the water close over his head again. He had focused on simply not letting their assailant win.

He recalls twisting himself backwards in the water, holding the knife with whatever flesh remained on his hand. His attacker had seemed to have youth and strength on his side, so he had pushed back and to his left, letting go of the knife as he had tried to simply get his body weight on top of the assailant.

That's when he had felt the other man's body go rigid, likely noticing the fins.

For one frozen moment they had locked eyes. Irises the color of a European sea, he remembers, widened with fear for the first time. Deciding whether to stay and finish the job or save himself.

The man had decided to give up the fight. He had pushed off, launching into a strong swim stroke back towards the boat that had drifted a dozen feet to the south.

He had expected the boat to pull away as soon as the attacker had pulled himself on board, leaving him with Kenny's body somewhere nearby and the predators in the water. After all the close calls in his life, he remembered marveling at the irony that this would be the way he went. A shark attack statistic and nothing more, because no one would know what had really happened to them.

He'd heard it then. The thrashing of the first shark as it must have found Kenny's lifeless form and the sound of the jet ski miraculously roaring to life.

The boat wouldn't be pulling away.

The horizon line had woven in front him; his eyelids weighted down with shock. His focus had remained on the bright white hulk of his boat, and on using one arm and his feet to kick himself closer.

He'd been struggling for breath when his good hand finally hit the smooth fiberglass of the _One Six_. When he had tugged on the rope of the emergency sea dog ladder, he had told himself there was nothing left of his neighbor. He knew that in his gut, but the horror of pulling himself aboard without his friend nearly made him throw up the saltwater he had swallowed.

It had just been a regular fishing trip. Nothing out of the ordinary. Until now. Kenny had been enlisted Navy over fifty years ago and this was his unfathomable burial at sea.

He blinks back the rain now. He needs to stay focused on survival, even now.

He's alone at night out here, and there's nothing assuring him that his attacker won't come back to finish the job. He's got to get to the radio. He needs help out here, storm be damned.

He tries to roll over, and the pain is ferocious. If he can just crawl up the single step that will take him to the radio, he can get some help.

He has to fight for every minute of lucidity. _Eileen._ She's home and he doesn't know if she's worried yet or if she's blissfully oblivious to what they'd encountered out here.

It's ironic, he thinks, that he'd retired yet here he is, still trying to get back into the Captain's chair once again.

-o0o-

* * *

It's a familiar sound that wakes her.

She knows that particular noise, it comes from across Noah's bedroom, near the closet – a floorboard that often creaks when she puts his clothes away.

She keeps her eyes closed, despite the fact that her heartrate quickens. She doesn't want the intruder to know she's awake yet until she can get her bearings. She's curled on her side, away from the closet, with Noah's pillow scrunched beneath her head. Her gun is behind her, on the end table and she probably won't be able to get to it before whoever it is –

Elliot.

She lets out a hard breath as she remembers. There is no relief in knowing its him, the reality of his presence is still so overwhelming she can't touch it yet. No matter what, he has no right to be in this room. She'd explicitly told him to leave her alone. She needed time and space to grieve tonight, so she could at least be marginally functioning by morning.

She doesn't know what the hell he's doing in here, but the defeat is overwhelming. It had taken everything in her just to fall asleep, and he's not only going to come barreling back into her life, but into her son's room while she's sleeping.

She's going to set some hard boundaries with him. There needs to be a limit to what she's expected to withstand.

Olivia tries to roll over to check the small clock on Noah's desk, but she can't seem to turn over. Panic explodes beneath her skin as she realizes she's strangely immobile, as if the blankets above her have weighted her down so heavily that she can't lift her arms or move her legs.

"Detective Benson, did you miss me?"

_No!_

Rationalization kicks in, but not fast enough to slow her wildly ricocheting pulse. There's no way that voice is real. Not in her apartment. Not in any way. Someone is playing a sick game, and if she can turn over she'll be able to face them head on. The voice is impossible, the fact that anyone had made it into her apartment is impossible.

She's paralyzed, without feeling even in her fingertips. It's only this dark because she hasn't even been able to open her eyes.

"Time to wake up. We have to get a move on, you're just wasting the night away."

She shudders, the voice so accurate it's haunting. Her mouth isn't covered in duct tape, but whatever he's done to her, she can't seem to scream. Maybe she's been injected with a paralytic. Dana Lewis had described exactly this years ago when she had been raped. She's horrifyingly fully awake and cognizant, but unable to move a single muscle.

If she could only yell for help and take the walls down with her voice until one of her neighbors calls the police. But it's not an option because her lips will not fucking move.

The terror starts to crowd in and she wills it away. Terror has never solved anything, it's never given her an edge, she reminds herself. She has too much experience with it to let it win now.

Her head feels detached from her body, as if she has zero control over the stone that has taken up residence in her limbs. Elliot is out there; he'd said he was taking the couch. There's no way someone could have made it this far. Not past the alarm, past the doors…past him.

Unless Elliot had finally used her room and doesn't know yet what is happening in here. Or maybe he's injured or dead. She feels the cold, thick emptiness start to spread through her. He would never, ever have let someone past him unless he'd fought and lost. That's what this is. She had lost Simon, Ed, David. Now she will lose herself, too, if he's gone.

"You lied, Olivia. He was your partner, right? You said your partner would have known what to do." The voice clucks in an amused admonishment once, twice. "He didn't."

The scream bubbles up, out of her stomach, her chest, her lungs. It gurgles past her tongue and her lips, her skin on fire in the seconds before it will char and peel off from this incinerator. Only nothing comes out. The scream is trapped inside of her, and the pressure of it feels like it will make her explode into tiny little bits.

She pushes past the paralytic, whatever he'd done to her. She fights it, if not with her fists then with her lungs.

The sound finally echoes in the room, and it's not for her, it's for him.

"_Elliot!" _

-o0o-

* * *

_Fucking hell. _

He sits up on the couch too fast, throwing off the blanket he'd found. He'd listened to her murmuring with agitation in Noah's room for the last thirty minutes, and he'd somehow talked himself down from going in there half a dozen times. He's been doing his damndest to take his cues from her, and she'd explicitly told him to stay out of the room, no matter what.

But fuck this. She'd screamed his name, and that gives him the right to go in there.

He grabs his t-shirt off the coffee table as he stands, pulling it over his head despite the fact that his hands are nearly shaking with frustration and fear. He rolls his neck, trying to calm himself down. It's a nightmare, he reminds himself. No matter what, she's physically alright in there and he cannot flip the fuck out.

The echoing sound of her terror is reverberating in his ears and his throat locks as he pads in bare feet towards Noah's closed door. It's quiet in there now, but he's not turning back.

How many times had she yelled for help while she'd been with that animal? How many times during the nightmares that would have followed? How many of those times had it been his name? Never, maybe. Once or twice.

He scrubs his hand down his face hard just outside the door.

_Jesus. _

He knocks lightly, despite his instincts to just let himself in. He knows enough about trauma to know that her boundaries will forever be tightly woven with her sense of self-protection and control, and he wants to make her feel safe, even if it kills him.

Some things will never fade.

"Olivia?" His voice is too low, so he clears it and knocks again. "Liv?"

He is about to try the handle when the door whips open. He steps back into the light of the hallway, unable to process the way she is looking at him.

Her eyes are flat, her pupils dilated. She's wrapping her robe around herself and tying the belt tightly but her hands are shaking so badly he can see it. Her skin is almost wet with perspiration, some strands of her hair sticking to her neck.

"I told you," she rasps, as if she's lost her voice. "I don't need your help."

He can barely hear her, but not due to her lack of volume; the rushing in his ears is so loud. She's lost some color to her skin, as if she's disappearing in front of him.

"How often does this happen?" he manages.

Olivia shakes her head and she starts to push past him towards the kitchen. It takes every ounce of his self-control not to reach for her and stop her so that she will talk to him. Instead he follows, leaning against the counter as she reaches in the fridge for another bottle of water.

His fingers grip the Formica so that he doesn't try to touch her.

"Please just go to sleep," she says quietly.

It's 4:30 a.m., and he's pretty sure he's not getting any more shuteye. He shifts, folding his arms across his chest to distract his hands. He just wants her to still. To look at him.

Nine years. He knows all the major milestones in her life, but she knows nothing of where he's been, or why. She's not going to give him jack shit, and she shouldn't.

He tries anyway.

"Liv, what happened in there?"

She takes a long sip from the bottle in her hands and then looks up to him, and the defensive spark is back in her still swollen eyes. "It's called sleep paralysis. It happens. I'm fine. I'm going to bed."

He can't let it go. He moves to his right first, not touching her yet effectively nearly blocking her way out of the narrow kitchen. "Tell me what that is."

She lifts her chin then, narrowing her gaze. "Google it. I don't owe you any explanations."

"How often does it happen to you?"

"None of your business," she shoots back, gripping her bottle of water so tightly he hears the plastic cave in a little bit.

He knows exactly what this is. She's trying to stonewall him into leaving her alone. Years ago, it would have worked. But he's not her partner anymore, and he's not afraid of blowing up their relationship, whatever it is at this point. He'd already blown it to all hell by disappearing on her for nearly a decade.

He searches her eyes and stops tiptoeing. "It was my name. Why?"

He can tell his blunt question surprised her by the small suck of air she takes in, but she doesn't break eye contact. The wariness and defeat start to creep into her expression, despite her best efforts to mask it with anger. "I had a bad dream," she says flatly. "He was in the room. I couldn't move. You were dead."

Oddly, his heartbeat slows. His hands itch to smooth her damp hair off her forehead, so he moves his fingers at his sides, trying to stretch them, curl them, anything that helps him to give her the physical space she is practically demanding. He wants to wipe the clamminess off her skin, pull her up against him until the throbbing of her pulse stops visibly pounding in her neck.

"Moore?" he asks, swallowing thickly and bracing himself. "Or Lewis?"

She takes a step back, flinching hard as if he'd struck her. He can see her eyes start to fill, her breathing getting harder. But she doesn't peel her gaze from his, even as she blinks once, twice. Then she comes closer to him, lifting her chin. "You don't ever, _ever_ get to mention him to me, do you understand me?"

He'd gone over this conversation a thousand times in his head in the years since, but he's never figured out how it would go. He doesn't care what she wants to throw at him now, how she will want to tear him apart. It doesn't matter, he deserves it. Nothing she could ever do to him will ever compare to what she's been through.

He's been assigned to this case now, by a jurisdiction that is beyond her control. No matter what happens her tonight, she can't avoid him.

It's that safety net that makes him push it.

"I know your file inside and out, Olivia. I made Porter get it for me. Probably have every word committed to memory. But I know that doesn't mean shit. I know you well enough to know everything isn't in there." He chews on his lower lip, looking past her at the cabinets so he can try to find words that will somehow explain the unthinkable. "It's my fucking fault, because if I hadn't…_detonated_ after Jenna, I woulda been the one to have your back. I would have never left you alone, knowing he was gunning for you like -"

"Shut up," she hisses, stepping even closer to him. "I said shut _up_." The color is back in her cheeks, even if she still sounds shaky. "So that's what this is? You're gonna sacrifice yourself now to make up for the fact that you _left? _You think this is your big chance to make it up to me?" She gets even closer, tipping her chin up further as her words hit like hot pockets of air against his skin. "You think it's like missing a birthday, El? Just gonna go big now and all is forgiven?"

"No-" he manages thickly. "I-"

"Aren't you lucky?" she cuts him off. "That Moore is…" she trails off, her voice catching as her eyes spill over. She blinks it away, ignoring her physical reaction. "That he's killing people I care about? Perfect chance to roll in and play hero with the big bad FBI behind you."

"Jesus, Olivia."

She opens her mouth again as if she's going to say something more, but then she suddenly stops as if startled that she'd even fought back in the first place. She looks lost in her own hallway, unfocused as if she's confused as to what just happened.

Grief. He recognizes it because he knows it well. It is the fiercest foe, striking out of nowhere and without warning.

She teeters a little bit and because he is the thing closest to her, her hand comes up and flattens against his chest to brace herself. He can feel the heat of her palm through the thin cotton of his t-shirt and he freezes, staring at her.

She doesn't look up at him, instead her gaze is trained on her hand as if she too is stunned by where it is.

He can't look away. His heart is slamming in his chest, and he wonders if she can feel it beneath her fingertips. Everything slows as her fingers start to close around the fabric of his shirt, fisting it instead of pushing him away. He doesn't know if she's going to come back from wherever she is right now and haul off and shove him, or if she's going to completely break.

It's the latter that is terrifying.

He doesn't move. He tries not to breathe. His hands curl into themselves as he denies them the reach he's desperate to make. He's had years of watching her, seeing her. He's kept tabs in a way that she will never forgive him for if – _when_ \- she finds out. It goes well beyond the Lewis folder. He hasn't had much to hang onto when it comes to the last nine years of her, but the glimpses have still been something.

She's had absolutely nothing of him. That's what he'd left her with.

The regret and failure that he'd lived with for years is back again, but he ruthlessly tempers how it threatens to sink him. He can't drown, not now. Not ever again. Self-loathing had never helped anyone, especially them. He's had more than enough time to fall and bounce back, and in his gut he knows he's cost her far too much in the process.

The seconds tick by, neither of them moving. His jaw grits involuntarily as he absorbs the weight of her hand, the slight dragging of his shirt beneath her fingertips. In the recesses of his mind he knows what the heat spreading through him is, and he does his best to will the blistering awareness away.

He's still failing in every way.

She's beautiful.

No makeup, bare feet, red eyes, with the horrors of the day still on her skin, and Olivia is every bit the warrior she'd been for all the years he'd been by her side. That she'd been by his. The time apart has taught him that this isn't love. It's never been anything as simple as that. Love is linear, organized.

She's spilled all the way into him, into every crevice of his life and head.

"Liv." It's as quiet as he can make it, and he doesn't know what he's about to say, but there are a thousand things that are vying to go next.

The sound of her name jars her, and she lifts her chin. Her fist remains, balling even further. "Why?" she whispers, cocking her head. He knows what she's asking. It's in the tumbling black shadows in her eyes.

The defensiveness is gone, and its place is something far more formidable.

Vulnerability.

The answer he's come to after all these years will never amount to much, but he has to say it, still has to give her his reasoning even if she doesn't understand yet. The urge to grip her hand is strong, just so she can feel how truly sorry he is.

"You were better off," he says, and that truth sounds like he's swallowing sand.

She takes a step back, pulling her hand off of him and cradling it with the other against her chest as if she's hurt it. She's focused on his neck and the shadows in her eyes fade, replaced with a hollow charcoal.

"My life, it was spiraling. My 'chute," he grates, licking his lips and pushing the panic aside as he tries to make her understand. "It wasn't opening, Liv. You woulda tried to save me and we would have both gone down. I had to…cut the cord."

She is breathing, but that's all he knows. He doesn't even know if she hears him.

"Our partnership." He shakes his head a little, despite the fact that his eyes are burning and his chest feels like it's been cut away where her hand had just been. "It was costin' you. You just didn't see it. I took too much. With me gone, you got Noah. You got promoted." He blinks hard, because the anger over who she'd been with has no place. Not here. Not tonight. "You fell in love, Liv."

Olivia comes back then, in little bits and pieces. Her pain-filled eyes focus again, her hands drop, and the corner of her lips lift in a sad smile. "I got two of the three." Her shoulders fall and she juts her chin out just a little bit. "Despite the fact you left, not because of it."

And before he can even dissect what she'd said, she's turned and stepped into Noah's room, closing the door and locking it behind her.

-o0o-


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N: **Thank you for sticking with me, with them and for pushing me to find time to write and be accountable with every review. I love knowing what resonates. Jess, thank you for making me work harder and think more with every chapter, I'm trying to put the things you teach me into practice. JessR, Amy and Lucy - thank you for letting me run motivations by you. You know the "why" drives me crazy. Song I wrote to for this chapter: Look After You, The Fray

* * *

The hot mug of coffee she's wrapped her hands around is doing nothing to warm her fingertips. Her scalding hot shower had similarly done nothing to warm her skin, and maybe it's because her blood is the thing that feels chilled.

She won't cry in front of him. She needs to get to the precinct and take back her squad or everyone will keep treating her like a victim, and she isn't. Not this time.

This time the victim is Don.

She sets the mug down too hard on the counter, and a bit of the liquid splashes over her fingers. She stares at the innocuous spill, pressing her lips together to ward off the insistent nausea. She'd emerged from her room dressed nearly twenty minutes ago and found Elliot sitting at the counter, a cup of coffee waiting for her.

He'd been expressionless. Too still. He'd looked at her for too long, and she hadn't looked away for too long and she can't examine why it has always felt like he's the center of gravity in the room.

Don had been attacked, he'd finally told her in a somber monotone. Lost three fingers and a friend, and he was in surgery to save his left hand. Coast Guard had found him two hours ago, covered in blood and vomit, his body showing signs of dehydration and shock.

The numbness settles into her bones, but she doesn't ward it off. It dulls her senses, and she desperately needs that protection. She's too aware of the wide span of Elliot's shoulders, his gravelly voice, the way he makes her apartment feel too small at all times.

_He's here_. With her. And she has no idea how to even begin to assimilate that reality with the one she's endured for the last nine years.

The overall devastation within her is growing, and her traitorous head keeps telling her it would be okay to simply trust him now, because the truth is that despite his absence, she's probably never stopped. Her mind is twisting and tumbling, playing time warp tricks on her that compress the impossible years he's been gone until every memory of them feels like it was yesterday.

Olivia wipes her wet fingers off with a towel and gives up on the coffee. She'd reheated it twice already and hasn't been able to drink it anyway.

"Let's get going." It's all she's able to say. There's no chance she will have an opportunity to go to Florida to see Don until this is all over, but she can't help but feel like she should be there. She knows Eileen is at St. Lucie Medical to be with her husband, and the FBI will interview him post-op, but she feels helpless. Responsible. It's barely eight, yet she has no right still being home when everyone around her is being hunted. "We should be in by now."

Elliot is showered and dressed too, and he's in the living room holstering his gun beneath his sport coat. He's wearing jeans and a henley again and it gives her insight about where he fits in with the Bureau. The casual attire means he's a street agent - narcotics or gangs maybe. She doesn't ask.

She isn't sure she is ready to know anything about his life during his blatant absence from hers. Knowing he'd gone on living without her is one thing. To know he'd been in law enforcement without her is another.

_This is my partner, Detective Stabler. _How she'd said that thousands of times, anchoring herself to it. Their past together had included every version of hell, but that time seems almost innocent compared to what the last years have brought. She's proud of making Captain, but the job itself has isolated her even more. The responsibilities are hers alone, the walls of her office keep her apart.

She doesn't know why her mind is roaming this morning. It's the last thing she needs. He's watching her and that means she's going to have to reign in the mental wandering.

Elliot gives her a soft, teasing half-grin that doesn't make it to his eyes. "Perimeter alarm is still on, I'm at your mercy until you disarm it. Probably a good idea that I have the code if I'm staying here?"

_Staying here_. Her stomach knots as shakes her head just a little bit. "No."

His smile instantly fades. "Why? You can change it when this is over, Olivia." He cocks his head as he comes closer to her, the kitchen counter between them. "What good does it do to keep that from me?"

Dread slips between her shoulder blades. He's right and they both know it. He's going to push this and there's no way to change it now before he finds out. She glares at him in warning, but he's not backing down. He locks eyes with her, and she knows the exact moment when he figures it out.

It doesn't take him long. A flare of recognition flashes in his eyes and it takes her breath away how well they can still read each other.

She's at a disadvantage on this side of the counter, but she moves fast and hopes he will back down or be a step slower than she anticipates. It's a lesson in futility because he's already turning on his heels and as a result she reaches the keypad a split second after he does. He puts his left elbow up against the wall, effectively holding her back from it.

"Stop it, Elliot," she says. "You're going to set it off if you're wrong." She wants to push him, to shove him straight out the front door but she paces her breathing instead. She won't touch him again, not even over this.

He's already punching in four numbers.

His old NYPD badge number. 6313.

Olivia closes her eyes as the alarm emits a small sound, indicating it had successfully been disarmed.

She remembers how she'd felt when she had programmed the code. Brian had just moved out, and she'd needed something – anything – to make her feel insulated. The elaborate alarm system, the code – it had been a surrogate cocoon around her. In the shattering absence of Brian's warm body or the unequivocal shelter of Elliot, it was the only remaining ally she'd trusted.

_My old partner, he'd know what to do. He'd break your teeth in. Break your arms, break your legs, break your back, break your face. _

Her need to have someone take over her safety both during and after those first days with Lewis had been embarrassing. A weakness she wouldn't ever admit at work or to Brian or Nick. She hadn't even confessed the depth of that need to Lindstrom. But late at night in the weeks after Brian had moved out, alone in her bed, she had self-soothed the vivid nightmares away by tucking every one of her pillows around her body until she hadn't felt exposed.

The shape of the pillows had never been a stand-in for Brian. In the darkness, she'd had wordless conversations with someone else. Some nights she had slipped from her bed and pulled on an old hoodie of his she'd once worn home after a case and never returned. It had taken the warmth of the familiar fleece and the weight of the pillows to make her sleep.

On the worst nights she'd clutch her phone, debating whether or not she had the right to breach his privacy and call him. Sometimes she would pretend that would be the night he'd call her instead.

Elliot never had.

She's so close to him now that she can smell her soap on his skin and she's involuntarily warming from the mesmerizing, enveloping heat that radiates off him. Elliot turns a moment later, facing her in the absolute silence.

"Don't make it more than it is," Olivia pleads quietly, silently willing him to let it go. It says too much about her that it's still the same code, the same humiliating need.

He doesn't say anything. Instead he slowly pulls out his cell phone from his coat pocket and holds it out to her, offering her the chance to take it from him. It's a late model iPhone, and the illuminated screen now indicates it requires a six-digit code.

It's an offering, and it's easier to just take it from him than to speak. Her hands shake just a little as she holds it. Six numbers.

She takes a deep breath and taps in her birthday. 02.07.68.

The phone unlocks.

Something inside of her does, too.

"Same, Liv," he says softly. "Okay?"

Her eyes prick with tears, so she drops her gaze to the floor until she can control her reaction. She hands him back his phone. Her breaths slow down and even out. For the first time in what feels like forever, she fully exhales.

When her eyes finally return to his, the blue is achingly familiar despite the new depths within it.

Olivia will not admit it, but the silence that sits heavy between them as they gather their things and head for her sedan feels oddly, inexplicably like the comfort she'd coveted all those years ago.

-o0o-

* * *

He's staying out of this one.

Elliot has so narrowly avoided arguments with her in the last hour that he's not taking this particular one on, because there is no fucking way he will win. For some reason he feels like her guard has come down a little bit with him since last night, and he isn't going to jeopardize that unless absolutely necessary.

He'd wanted to make an overt, baiting appearance with her on the way to the precinct by getting a cup of coffee together at the Starbucks near her apartment and she had refused, citing a need to get to her office. Olivia's anxiety had skyrocketed the second they had stepped out of her building - her eyes darting left and right, her head swiveling to watch their back – that he had let it go.

She'd wanted to drive and since he didn't have his vehicle yet, he'd been forced to let that go too.

He'd tried to encourage her to eat one of the muffins ADA Carisi had apparently brought in for the team and left in a box on Rollins' desk, but Olivia had warned him back with a look.

This fight was much bigger – and it was all Porter's.

"You have to take a step back, Olivia," Porter was telling her, his voice nearly irritatingly calm. "You can send someone into the box with my agent, but it won't be you."

Fin and Kat had located Annabella, Moore's soon to be ex-wife of twenty-five years, in Chicago last night. In the throes of a messy, public divorce, she'd been only too willing to come to New York via private plane this morning on the FBI's dime if it meant sticking it to Tobias.

She is currently sitting in Interrogation One, in full-makeup and wearing ten-thousand dollars worth of Gucci as she crosses her legs next to Harper Troy, her very high-profile, very high-powered attorney.

There's no way in hell Porter is going to let Olivia be the one to question Annabella's knowledge of Moore's whereabouts. Olivia might not classify herself as a victim or a target right now, but the FBI and the NYPD both unequivocally do.

"This is a joint investigation," Olivia fires back, nearly snarling as she raises one eyebrow. In her black slacks, button down shirt and black leather boots, she looks far more formidable today than she had in that dress yesterday. "I haven't been asked to sit out by my own superiors. I'll be damned if you're going to keep me out of my own interrogation room."

Elliot lets out a deep breath and leans back, supporting himself on Rollins' empty desk behind him. He's thankful that the only ones witnessing this right now are Carisi and Fin. He's sure that Rollins is with her kids at the hotel, and he doesn't know where the fuck everyone else is but he will take the small win that this argument isn't playing out in front of a wider audience.

Porter takes a step closer to Olivia. "The FBI flew her here, Captain Benson. Procedure dictates she's now ours."

He knows what throwing out rank and titles is going to do. It's akin to tossing kerosene on a fiery pile of shit. There isn't enough fire retardant in the world to get all of them through this day safely.

"Captain, you can't formally be on the record as having interrogated any of the witnesses," Carisi interjects carefully. "Hadid made that clear."

But both Olivia and Porter are going toe-to-toe now, and if the rookie ADA had an ounce of self-preservation, he'd go dig out one of the chocolate muffins and get some milk and just sit down and wait for the dust to settle.

As expected, Olivia ignores the interruption, stepping even closer to Dean. "The FBI is on a really thin leash with me right now. You want to discuss procedure? Do you normally go pulling files on NYPD detectives and passing them around the break room over at Fed Plaza?"

_Shit. _He should never have confessed who gave him the Lewis file last night. The room feels almost combustible now, and even Fin takes a sharp breath. Elliot tries to shake off the building dread because he knows Olivia far better than Porter every will, and he knows how close to the edge she is at this very second.

He's the one she's throwing on the pyre, but it's a small price to pay to watch her slowly coming back.

This is who he remembers, this is his fierce as hell former partner. Elliot watches her and how she owns this room now, even on the losing end of an argument and in the middle of her own personal abyss. She's a daunting opponent, unwilling to back down when she believes in the cause.

_Captain Benson. _

He's so goddamn proud of her. She'd always been stronger than all of them combined. She'd taken her hell and elevated herself to nearly untouchable status in the NYPD in the aftermath. She was the face of Special Victims for the force. She'd survived Lewis, negotiated hostage situations, dismantled trafficking and prostitution rings, adopted a victim's child and navigated hundreds of cases to one of the best close rates of any department in Manhattan.

He knows the highlights and none of what she'd looked like in those moments. What she'd sounded like. What she had feared or how she had fought.

He swipes his hand down his face, knowing he can't erase what he'd done by walking away.

Porter, as usual, doesn't flinch or acknowledge her accusation. He does shoot Elliot a quick pointed look, but he doesn't let it change his demeanor. His face remains impassive, unperturbed by Olivia's anger. "Based on your lack of cooperation, I'll move Annabella Moore to my office. We can take it from there."

Olivia is visibly gritting her teeth, but she relents just in time to strategically keep things on her turf. "She stays here, and I want Sergeant Tutuola in there."

"Fine," Porter agrees, quickly smiling a little too amiably at her acquiescence. "Agent Stabler will take lead and your Sergeant can join him."

Olivia's eyes darken as she turns now to glare at Elliot. The fact that he will be in that room and she will at best observe is very obviously grating on her already brittle nerves. He shifts uncomfortably when she looks at him just a little too long, with something akin to betrayal in her eyes.

He knows what she's thinking. He's on this case, but he's not technically on her team. She doesn't understand that no matter which badge is in his wallet, he's only here – he only went after the new badge in the first place – because of her.

"She hates her husband," she snaps at him, walking towards her office. "He's humiliated her with the rape accusations and infidelity. She wants to take the money and run before the civil suits wipe them out. Use that."

Elliot nods, cracking his neck as he straightens. Years ago he would have rolled his eyes at the obvious direction, but right now he's on such thin ice that he just needs to escape the room.

He stays silent, and she rewards him by turning her focus onto Porter.

"My office. _Now." _

Technically Special Agent Dean Porter had no reason to listen to the directive, but as he walks by Elliot now, heading towards Olivia, he finally looks annoyed. "This is your personal shitstorm I'm walking into," he mutters.

Shitstorm doesn't begin to cover it, Elliot thinks as he follows Fin to an interrogation room.

This whole situation is a damned landslide, and it will bury all of them if even one of them makes a wrong move.

-o0o-

* * *

It's just after ten a.m. and she already has a splitting headache.

It doesn't help that all she wants is to go see Noah. She'd Factetimed with him, but there's no substitute for the chance to hold him, hear him laugh or listen to one of his wildly imaginative theories. Her arms ache for him to the point of pain. She'd heard Kathy and Eli in the background when she'd been talking to her own son, and she can't even begin to comprehend that the baby she'd once held in an ambulance is the same pre-teen she'd heard arguing with his mother.

Every minute of the day feels like a Mack truck coming straight at her. The collision of past and present is overwhelming.

One hour until Cragen is expected out of surgery. One day since they had buried Ed. She wants to get to the scene of David's…

_Murder. _

Her throat locks with the searing agony. This is how the grief keeps coming at her, in relentless waves that come barreling in out of nowhere. She wants to apologize to David's children and his family but nothing will be adequate. She wants to call Tracy and make sure Simon's stepson and the niece she sickeningly doesn't even really know are alright. She has to look out for the children her brother will never see again, despite the fact that he'd been working towards rebuilding his life so he could be a part of his family. Nausea spreads across her chest again and she flattens her fingertips on her desk until they turn white, bracing herself so she doesn't falter.

The list of what and who she owes seems insurmountable.

Dean walks into her office behind her and he shuts the door, aware of what's coming.

She needs an outlet and she won't disappoint him.

"You want to play the protocol game, Dean?" She cocks her head, narrowing her eyes at him. "Why don't we discuss rules and procedure? Did you give Elliot my file before or after he joined the FBI?"

Standing and facing her from across her desk, Dean remains stoic. He looks the same as the last time she saw him, save a few more lines around his eyes and the gray at his temples. The stagnancy in his appearance grates on her nerves, because absolutely fucking everything has changed since she'd last seen him. Nothing should be familiar after all this time. The familiarity will sink her. "What difference does that make?"

His lack of emotion is so infuriating that she wants to specifically unleash on him, as if he alone has blown up her world. _"When?"_

"When what?" He presses his lips together, and it almost seems like he's amused.

"When did he join? When did he get my _goddamned_ file?"

"Why don't you ask him?"

"Because if you gave him that file before he joined, then I'm going to file a grievance with your ASAC." Olivia straightens, despite the dizziness that is closing in around her.

Dean glares at her, crossing his arms over his chest. "Go ahead. Holmes gave the green light. Stabler had something the Bureau needed."

"What did he have?"

His stubborn silence starts a slow bass beat within her temples. The anger has continued its ascent now though, and the control she's been ruthlessly holding onto is starting to break. She stalks around her desk, coming to stand right in front of her former case agent. "You traded me?"

"Not you. Your file." He unfolds his arms, almost daring her to come closer.

Her fists starting to curl inward. "Why did you have a file on me in the first place?"

"We have ongoing files on all our borrows."

Olivia flinches at the casual way he described her grueling weeks undercover for the Bureau. As if she'd been nothing more than a library book the FBI had used and returned. As if those weeks hadn't cost her dearly. "So you gave a civilian my file?"

The twist of his lips is neither amused nor angry. "Didn't say he was a civilian at the time. Nice try. Regardless, I didn't have a choice."

"We all have a choice!" she hisses at him.

"Do we?" Dean cocks his head. "I thought you understood that our personal feelings don't matter on the job, Olivia. Whether I wanted him to have it or not is entirely irrelevant. It got the job done."

She can't do this today. This stone wall he is putting up is more than she can batter herself against. But she needs answers, she needs something to make sense in a world that doesn't seem to have any order anymore. "Why did Elliot join the Bureau?" she asks, far quieter than she'd hoped she would be.

The look he gives her is incredulous, as if he's assessing whether or not she's serious. "You had all night with your partner. You didn't ask him?"

The room feels like it's swaying. Her throat won't work. _Not my partner_, she wants to scream. _It's been years and years and he chose to work with you when he came back! _

"It's confidential," he tells her, finally easing his stance.

"Just like my file was," she whispers, rubbing her temples. Needing something solid beneath her, she leans back against her desk, praying it gives her the stability she is desperate for. "So he shows up one day, asks for my file and you just give it to him?"

"No."

She fights the urge to lean over herself and cry. The anger isn't working, and the lack of answers is grating against her skin. Every pore feels raw. She wants Elliot to disappear and at the same time she wants him in here right now, and she is too vividly aware of why people throw themselves against walls in padded rooms.

Olivia's chest feels like it's forming fissures, the cracking fingers easing outwards and weakening everything in their path.

"Just tell me." Her voice is too small but she doesn't care now. She needs the agent who had been her friend over a dozen years ago, not the one in front of her who tows the company line.

Dean must take some level of pity on her because he exhales deeply. "I'd been looking for him, Olivia."

She lifts her head then, not understanding and praying that Dean will simply lay it out because the fight is quickly draining from her.

He looks at her for too long and he must see something pathetic because he uncharacteristically softens. "Two weeks after you got away from Lewis, I had to look for him. Can't tell you why so don't ask." Dean pauses, as if carefully considering what he is about to say. "I couldn't find him. Looked for three days, but his wife had no idea where he'd been so I staked out the one place I figured he could be counted on to show up." He smiles ruefully. "I got lucky."

Olivia grips the edge of her desk, the sounds of everything beyond her office dulling into a soft roar. "Where?"

"Your apartment. Apparently he still had a key."

Her chest splits, her lips are too dry. She lets her head drop so he doesn't see the way her eyes suddenly burn with the sheen of tears. She thinks she's going to be sick, because she remembers what her old place had looked like after Lewis. The way it had been left as if frozen after the fight because she hadn't let anyone clean it for her for months. Broken tables and chairs, overturned plants and the curtains coming off the walls. One particular chair still had the duct tape stuck to it; a half-burned hanger had remained in the middle of the floor. Evidence of her battle for survival had permeated every inch of that nightmarish house of horrors. "It was completely destroyed," she whispers.

Dean nods. "Yeah, and…" He pauses, considering what he's about to say. "So was he, Olivia."

She bends over a little, praying air will reach her lungs. Her arms wrap around her waist. The bedsheets in the apartment had all been ripped away, and she wants to rock herself a little bit just thinking about what Elliot must assume.

She's gutted that he'd seen that much of her battle. Then again he'd had absolutely no right to go there. No right at all. He knows too much and she's too exposed and she just can't get a break because the shaking is back.

He'd been _inside _that apartment.

The skin above her left breast itches, as if it is still healing from the burns. Her face feels wet, as if she's being waterboarded beneath the onslaught of vodka. The paralyzing fear that the animal would light her up when she was soaked in alcohol is back again, crowding the edge of her vision.

She wishes her mind would just go dark now, just for a little while so she could get her bearings. The time continuum of her life has been crumbled into a tiny ball, and she's crushed somewhere in the middle of it.

"You should know," Dean continues, starting to head for her office door. She thinks he stops and turns back to face her right before he walks out, but she can't lift her head to look at him. His voice is oddly gentle. "I don't think it was the first time he'd been there, Olivia. He was sitting against the wall in the dark, drinking a beer as if he'd been there before. I offered him a one-time job because we needed him for a UC, and I convinced him it was a way out of whatever corner of hell he'd found in that place. He works child trafficking for us now, think it might be the only way he knew how to help you."

_My old partner? He'd know what to do. He wouldn't question himself after what you've done. _

She'd been wrong. Elliot had viciously punished himself with the self-recriminations too. In the middle of a nightmare, he hadn't known what to do any more than she had.

She closes her eyes then, and a few seconds later Special Agent Dean Porter mercifully closes her office door behind him.

-o0o-

* * *

He holds a single cup of rooibos tea as he enters Interrogation Two.

The room is cast in shadows despite the fact that it's barely one p.m. The observation window to the hallway had been closed, so he hadn't known what to expect when he'd carefully opened the door.

Nearly two hours in the other room with Annabella had netted them permission to search half a dozen residences without pulling federal warrants, which would save them a lot of time. She'd agreed to allow them access to the security footage at each location in exchange for a promise that her final divorce proceedings – currently slated for sixty days out – would be expedited to next week. She hadn't been privy to any of Moore's obsession with Olivia, but it was enough to be helpful.

None of it matters in this moment though.

He'd gone looking for Olivia and instead found Kat in the bullpen. She'd told him that shortly after hearing Cragen was out of surgery and wouldn't lose his hand, Olivia had slipped into this room.

Over an hour ago.

The blinds are closed throughout and the room is bathed in small strips of light that criss-cross over the floor. It's too warm in here and he wonders if she'd adjusted the temperature. It's a trick they'd used on perps for years to make them uncomfortable, but he assumes she'd just been trying to stop shivering.

He steps inside and closes the door quietly behind him, silencing his phone.

Without the light from the hallway, Olivia is illuminated only in shades of gray as she sits huddled at the table. Her elbows rest on the metal surface in front of her, her palms cradle her face. She doesn't lift her head if she hears him.

She's silent, unnaturally still. In the darkness he has to rely on faith to know she's breathing. It's possible she's sleeping, and if she is then he doesn't want to wake her. The sheer torture she's been through in the last twenty-four hours is numbing, and she hasn't taken any time to process or grieve.

She doesn't know that as of five minutes ago, he'd convinced Porter to call Garland to get an official order to send her home with him. The directive hasn't come through yet, but he prays she won't fight him on it when it does.

Elliot sets the tea on the table as quietly as he can.

He swears he can hear the ticking of his watch bounce between the soundproof hollows of the room. For a moment he remains frozen, just watching her. As his eyes adjust to the darkness he can see the rise and fall of her shoulders, and he focuses on the way her hair falls forward, the loose waves of it spilling through her hands.

_Olivia. _

He desperately wants to touch her, but he's learned how to live with the way his need haunts him. He's had a lifetime of practice when it comes to her and restraint.

The last nine years have been a hell he can't comprehend, but nothing he's been through compares to what she'd experienced. He'd instantly give his life for her, but he hadn't been willing to give her the mess of him for years. She's let people love her, but from what she said last night she'd only fallen for her son.

_Look how great you turned out_.

She'd fought to build a life for herself in the midst of horror. She always known how to rise above the adversity; he'd always sunk deeper.

She'd been right early this morning when she said the Moore case had saved him. He hadn't known how to walk back into her life, he doesn't know if he would have ever had the guts to shake up her world again. But he's here now, and he doesn't want to examine just what it has cost to create this moment.

Standing in this interrogation room with her nearby, he's more rooted than he's been in nearly a decade.

He hears it then, the quietest sound of a single sniffle.

She's been awake for the last few minutes and she hasn't asked him to leave or told him to go screw himself, and that has to mean something.

Elliot makes his way around to her side of the table, slowly pulling out the chair next to her. She doesn't shift or flinch even as he lowers himself into it.

His heart constricts and expands slowly, as if unwilling to make a noise that will jar her. He rests his forearms on the table next to hers, careful not to touch her despite the overwhelming urge. He's pretty sure that she can hear his pulse now, and if he could quiet his breaths he'd hear hers in a matching beat.

He'd gone across the street to the _Blue Line_ to get her the tea he hoped she still ordered, and as much as he wants her to finally get anything at all in her stomach, he isn't willing to break the glass of silence to ask her to drink it. He doesn't know what is on the other side of that fragile window.

It's Olivia who finally speaks, in the barest of whispers pushed into the cavern she's made of herself. "You went to my old apartment."

The shadows seem to darken into blackness. The smell of the fragrant tea now makes his stomach turn, the same way the vodka-soaked carpet had in the hours he'd spent inside those walls, just trying to grasp how it had come to this. He wants to close his eyes now too, but he's afraid he will see it again. Long strands of her hair on the kitchen counter, the open, half-torn off the hinges cabinets because she'd fought near the stove. The burned key on the counter, the blood on the cracked glass of a painting, head high. The single blood-formed handprint on the counter, just the size of hers. The six-inch piece of cut rope that lay grotesquely on the middle of her white rug, right next to a dark red stain.

Olivia's blood, spilling again and again.

The pressure in his chest could form diamonds, and he chews on his lower lip to try and release it. He doesn't know what the hell to say. Even divinity would fall short.

"El." Then she says it again, testing it. _"El."_

In the heated stillness he feels it. Her body starts ever so slowly to slip to the left, towards him. Her hands still cover her face, but she lets her left arm come to rest against his right one. By some miracle Olivia is leaning into him and not away, and for the rest of his life he will never understand why. Her covered face pushes into the top of his arm and then he can't withstand the confines of his self-imposed discipline.

Her knee hits his as he shifts just a little bit towards her, and Olivia's fingers fall to wrap around his elbow, near where his shirtsleeve is rolled up. He can smell the faint citrus of her shampoo and feel the way the top of her head bumps into his chin when he turns his head to the right. She finally settles, her left temple resting on his shoulder.

He's alarmingly aware of her. He's got a savior tattooed on one arm, and Olivia pressed against the other and he's going to go to hell because he doesn't ever deserve absolution from either one of them.

"Why did you go there?" She exhales the question into the thick air around them.

He can tell she's been crying hard by the ragged sound of her voice. At least she has one. He's not sure he will have his own if he tries to verbalize an answer.

The silence ticks between them, and he can't tell her why he'd gone there. He'd used his old key one night and the lingering smell of the alcohol and burned flesh had hit him as soon as he had stepped in the door. The echoing sounds of her fighting back had been loud and cacophonous in his head, and he'd internally catalogued every displaced, broken thing in that apartment. He'd visualized her struggle again and again, and he had absorbed the words Cassidy had said to him when he'd shown up at the hospital to see her as an edict. A mantra. _Stay away from her, she's better off._

Had he not left her after Jenna, he'd have had a detail on her place. He would have sat outside himself. But he'd left, and he'd caused her to be left vulnerable and exposed.

His fault. Those two words have banged around in his head like a drum for years and years. He wakes to them, and tries to sleep despite the fact that they get louder in the middle of the night.

Olivia's fingers move against his skin, pushing into his arm. "None of it was your fault."

Words will not fucking form and he feels like his own larynx is going to suffocate him.

The regrets, the apologies, the insanity that he had failed her so spectacularly all become a jumbled mess in his head. "I should have been there, Liv." It's pathetic how only that comes out, and how he's too weak to move his lips from near the top of her head when he admits the deepest valley in him.

"You were," she murmurs, her breath hitching. "You…gave me permission to go after him. And I needed it. I had to…I wanted to _kill _him."

His cheek twitches in pain, his jaw is grinding his teeth to dust. He has a terrifying need to both pull her into him and destroy the room around them all at the same time. His fists ache for the contact with the walls because something, anything has got to give. There is a pressure cooker heating up between his temples. He holds her tea in between his palms in an effort to keep still. "You shouldn't have had to. It should have been me."

"No," Olivia turns her forehead into his shoulder. Her voice is soft but steadier than he can comprehend. "It was mine to do. If I had finished him, there wouldn't have been any more vics. That's on me."

It's the quietest conversation he's ever had and every word is the loudest noise he's ever heard. She's embedded into his skin now, and he wants to never, ever walk out of that door without her again.

Because she's always been more than him, she again breaches the silence.

"He didn't rape me."

She offers him the truth so simply and so bluntly in this dark cocoon of a room that he prays no one comes in for hours. She's saving him again, and he's an asshole because he needs this, needs her talking to him so much that he can't stop her.

"It took me awhile, but I figured that out," he rasps. "I read the court transcripts…after. He would have told everyone if-"

Olivia's short fingernails finally dig into his arm to suddenly stop him. "No more."

He lifts his head and nods, unable to say anything. He knows this conversation isn't over, but for now she's right. Neither one of them can take too much at once. It's only that knowledge that keeps him from turning completely into her and urging her onto him.

For over twenty years, she's been a part of him. He doesn't know when she let go of him, but he's never been able to do it with her.

"Tell me what happened with Annabella." Her tone is forcibly even as she straightens then, breaking contact with him. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and reaches for the tea. He pushes it towards her, and he can hear her struggle to swallow the first sip she takes.

He wants to make up for every single day he's been gone. Day by day by day.

The way she asks him about Annabella reminds him of a lifetime ago, when she'd sit across from him late in the evening, questioning him about their case, wholly unaware of what the lamplight would do to illuminate her eyes.

"She gave us access to the security cams at the residences. There are over six hundred of them, the guy made a damned movie out of every moment of his life. Profilers at the Bureau last night think this is one guy. Moore wouldn't trust many." He clears his throat, trying to keep the cadence of his voice low so as not to jar her. "With the attack on Cragen and Haden less than a day apart, we're tracking all private planes between Treasure Coast airport and pulling commercial passenger lists between Palm Beach and NYC metro airports."

He has a thousand questions for her and they all remain silent, willing to wait.

But the door opens then, too fast and too loud. She jerks a little bit, nearly spilling her tea as light from the hallway floods the room. Elliot wants to kill Fin for breaking the sanctity of whatever was happening in here, and niceties fail him. "You should have knocked," he bites off.

Fin drags his gaze back from where it had rested on Olivia. "You should have called."

_Jesus. _

He's got nothing.

It's Olivia who saves all of them, grabbing her tea and standing but still woozy enough that Elliot notices her hold onto the table. "What do you have, Fin?"

Fin flicks the lights on, and she blinks once or twice, trying to refocus. He knows what Fin is doing by trying to re-center Olivia, but he'd have done anything for even five more minutes alone.

"Cragen's awake. Said the guy who jumped him is late twenties, early thirties. Wore a wetsuit and mask, but his eyes were distinctive. They've got a sketch artist on their way to him now. Also tracking jet ski rentals in a five-mile radius."

Elliot stands now too, knowing that with a basic description it will be easier for the team at the Bureau to analyze the passenger lists on the planes. "Hold Annabella until we get that sketch, lets see if she recognizes him."

"Let me know when it comes in, Fin," Olivia says quietly, starting to make her way out of the room.

Fin stands there, as if guarding the exit. "I'll have to call you," he says without looking at her, instead giving Elliot a flat, disgusted look. "Because your buddy here asked to have you both sent home. Chief Garland's now made it official orders. Not sure how being cooped up with Special Agent Stabler is going to help you any, but that ain't my call."

By the suddenly rigid, frozen posture of Olivia's back, Elliot knows that whatever progress they'd just made together has just been shot to hell.

"Liv-" he starts.

But she turns on him, her wide eyes filled with anger and disbelief. He can see the way her hand starts to close tightly around the tea before she tosses it hard into the trash can that sits next to the door. "Fuck you, Elliot. You've got _no_ right. I don't need you to protect me." Her eyes dart angrily back and forth between his, making sure he's paying attention. "You gave up that right a long time ago."

And before he can say a word to defend himself, she's gone.

* * *

-o0o-


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N:** I'm so deeply sorry this has taken so long. Life things. I hope everyone is hanging in there with everything going on. I want to shout out my brilliant beta for finding the things I do not see. And Brynn (my HumanWhip), for every push, support and the incredible vision board you made for me so I can stay on track with this fic. I'll share the link to it on Twitter for everyone, it's amazing. Also I write to a single song on repeat for every chapter. I'll share for whomever wants to read to the sound of it. This chapter is owed to this song.

And finally, this chapter is dedicated to my newfound amazing friend eotopia...Happiest of Birthdays love. I'm sorry you're not here, but as we know life has a plan. You're such a sweet, pure soul and I adore you. This one is all you. 3

_Song: All We Do – Oh Wonder_

* * *

The rain has started again, but inside Chauncey's there are few reminders of the outside world.

The bar has been here for over forty years, and it holds the remnants of case victory celebrations and too many shots of burning whiskey after losses. One thick door leads in and out, and there are barely any windows that reveal its contents to the world. The wait staff who serve the few wooden booths know the regulars. The bartenders stay for decades, the memories are either gone by morning or they last a lifetime.

The air is soaked with the stench of spilled liquor, as if they've walked into the caverns of a worn oak barrel.

They have been coming here since the beginning of their partnership, but by the curious look their waitress is giving them today, even she knows that Olivia hasn't been here with Elliot since anyone can remember.

Olivia doesn't know if he brought her here to shake the memories loose or because with a target on his back, he knows it's the only place she will feel even marginally safe in public. He'd chosen one of the booths where they both have a line of sight to the door, and they had slid in wordlessly. Faced with her obstinate silence, he had ordered her something she would have chosen to eat a decade ago and she didn't correct him because she refused to speak and tell him things aren't the same.

_You leave me alone. _

The memory of her biting command is sharp, and it bounces around inside the hollows of her.

It's been twenty years, but she still remembers the way she'd turned her fury on him. She'd been the target of a psychopath who had killed innocent people to get back at her. She'd taken leave and tracked him herself. In the civilian's apartment where they'd been facing off, she had shot Plummer three times before Elliot had walked in. Her hands had been shaking and her gun still warm when Elliot had placed his hand over her wrist to steady her.

He'd always been the squad ViCAP liaison for the FBI, and he'd gone behind her back and put a federal protective detail on her during that case. She'd confronted him, rebelled, twisted beneath his stifling protectiveness.

_You leave me alone. _

An order. She'd hissed the words at him before she'd walked out of that apartment. Only he hadn't listened. Hours later he'd showed up at her place. He'd banged on her door. He'd called her.

It was only when she'd seen him standing outside – still stubbornly waiting beneath her apartment windows in the rain -that she'd put on her coat and taken the stairs down to him. She had never been able to shut him out for long. She'd been crying and it hadn't mattered. The drenching rain was an excuse for her wet eyes, and he wouldn't have believed her lies had she even tried to use them.

He'd brought her here late that night.

_In his mind, every man is guilty of the good he did not do. _

She'd looked up at Elliot as he'd bent the Voltaire quote to suit his intent. He'd been part hero, part foe in that moment. He'd been steady, so sure of himself when she had been completely gutted. She'd latched onto the lock of his eyes as the whiskey had appeared in front of them both. He should have been home with his family that night, his kids had been mere babies and his wife still in love. But here he'd sat - in a dark fortress of a bar off 26th street - letting the amber heat slide down his throat as he smiled at her softly with just his eyes.

_Their deaths were at his hand, not yours. Don't lose sight of the line. _

The whiskey had been cheap, they were young and it hadn't mattered. She had downed her shot. _What if I can't find it, El?_

_Then I'll find it for you. Just like you'll find it for me. _

The pain inside of her now is so thick that she feels like it's slowing her blood to the point of paralysis. She had needed her squad today; she'd been desperate for the ability to hunt Moore herself.

Another madman, another round of victims. Endlessly the cycle turns. Only this time the victims are her history, her circle, hers.

Elliot removed her choices today, and she's chafing beneath the way he keeps imposing his will.

So much has been taken away from her that the dichotomy of Elliot's return grates on her. She wants to go back to the way it was weeks ago, months ago. The upheaval is too much on every front.

It's too much to assimilate.

"Olivia-"

"Leave me alone." It comes out of her mouth in a familiar, quiet warning before she can stop it, but at this point she doesn't really care what she says or does. She's been telling him for twenty years it seems, and he doesn't listen. She doesn't even know if it's a directive or an accusation anymore. He just keeps coming at her, treating her life like it's a snow globe he can shake up at will. "Just. Stop. Talking."

She doesn't even look at him. His presence in her life after all these years can't happen. She can't touch him, lean on him, rely on him. In a few days when this is over, they will go back to how it was.

She can't forget that.

They will go back to being strangers and these moments will just be an aberration.

Mercifully her food comes then, and she uses the distraction it provides to avoid meeting his gaze. She glances disinterestedly at her lightly toasted turkey on rye, the fries, the side of fruit. She's both exhausted and angry, and the emotions are at war within her for which feeling gets to go first.

His food comes, too. A burger with sharp cheddar, no onions. Fries. Pickle. She finds herself irrationally mentally reaching for the pickle and she stops herself because she will not pretend the unimaginable gap of the last nine years does not exist.

The waitress leaves and despite the plate in front of her, she isn't hungry. She hasn't had an appetite for days.

Her hands sit at her side. The front door opens and her eyes are on the movement, because that's the reason they are here after all. He's a target. He's made himself the bait.

It's just a woman, alone. She wears yesterday's clothes and she heads straight for the bar.

"Olivia. You can still silently damn me to hell while chewing." His voice is a low rumble. An undisguised demand. "Eat something. Please."

That's when she looks up at him and it's an ongoing gut-punch to see him so close to her. She takes in the slight tilt of his head, the deeper lines on his face. His forearms rest on the table and even out of the corner of her eye she can see the length of his thick fingers, the lack of a ring. His shoulders seem harder, there's an underlying danger to him that is sharper now.

But his eyes, they are the same in this moment. Soft, seeing too much.

Her lips don't move. Her chest is too weighted, and there is a fog enveloping her. A low beat starts from the digital jukebox, and absently Olivia realizes the woman who had just walked in has started this thrumming song.

She has to detach herself from the familiarity of him. Of this place. These are memories, this is not the present nor the future.

This is a temporary hold.

She has a job to do. So does he.

He shifts in front of her, setting down his burger and wiping his mouth. He's picking up the pickle and setting it on her plate as she watches, and it's the wrong move on every level.

He has a complete lack of boundaries. He is either too little space or too much, it's never painless with him.

"I don't want it," she says quietly, and even she can hear the warning in her whisper.

He doesn't even look up. "Olivia, eat."

He overrides her so easily and effortlessly that the haze within her starts to simmer, gaining heat. He's enjoying his lunch, not even looking at her. "Take it off my plate, Elliot. Now."

He must hear her brittle tone. He has to know there is nothing inside of her that is calm. He has to know enough to recognize the escalation, even if she isn't any louder.

He takes another big bite of his burger, wiping his mouth again and then easing back into his side of the booth. He cracks his neck, sprawling enough that his knee brushes hers and she gasps, jerking back on her own side.

Elliot is watching her now through hooded eyelids. He swallows his food, takes a slow sip of his soda. "You think you're in any shape to run point today? That it?"

She can feel the oxygen seeping back into her veins. He's going to give her the fight she needs, and by God, she will rip this ill-found confidence of his to shreds. She wants this release, there is too much inside of her to contain it anymore.

"It's my squad. Not your call." She leans over the table, careful to avoid her untouched plate. "You like ratting out other cops, Elliot?"

The corner of his mouth lifts, and the smile doesn't touch his eyes. He doesn't look at all afraid of her, and that pisses her off even more.

"Not as much as your boyfriend did." He shifts forward too, so that he is mere inches from her across the table. "So how does that work, Liv? Guy tries to ruin both of our careers a dozen times. Throws you in jail despite whatever the _fuck_ happened in Sealview. Questions every damned move you make, harasses you, and that's who you date?"

The heat is back everywhere within her. It's a blue-hot burn beneath her skin, and she will end this now. He has no right to be back, to be here. He'd left, dammit.

"He was a good man, Elliot." Her voice is rising, and she doesn't care. Between the music and the high walls of their booth, it will take a hell of a lot to draw an audience. "You and I messed up, that's what we did. We bent the rules. He had a job to do and he did it. You do _not _get to talk about him."

He gives her a humorless huff of laughter as he shakes his head, seconds before he picks up his food again. "That sonofabitch jammed me up so bad I would have been a beat cop if I'd tried to come back." He takes another bite as if he hasn't just dropped a bomb between them.

Olivia ignores the dread that slides down her spine at what he's saying. She had always assumed there would have been hoops for Elliot to jump through after the shooting, but she'd always believed there had been a path back to Detective First Grade. To SVU. To them. To her. "And yet you're back, so it seems it worked out fine." Her voice is shakier now than she had expected.

He slams his burger down and washes the bite down with his drink. "Do you even know what he did, Olivia? I was cleared on the shooting. Even if I didn't clear myself, the brass said it was a good shoot, whatever the hell that means." He is coiled now, his jaw jumping as he narrows his eyes. "Tucker opened up a secondary investigation. He used a scalpel to carve up my jacket. He interviewed my wife. He interviewed _Richard _because I grabbed my kid in the squad room in the middle of a nightmare. History of violence, he told my kid. _Did you know that_?"

All of it knocks her breath away, but she can't let him have this. If he's trying to crack her veneer of civility, he's doing a good job. Ed is gone, he lost whatever time he had left because of her and she won't make excuses or absorb any more blame right now. Ed had been just as broken as the rest of them. "How could I know that when you _never fucking picked up the phone?_"

Everything on the table had bounced just a little bit as she retaliated, and she realizes a second too late it's because she had slammed her hand down on the table hard. Her palm stings and her eyes burn and her chest is on fire.

When Olivia finally looks at him again, she realizes they are both a little shell-shocked, somehow absorbing the parrying verbal blows.

It's Elliot who manages to find his voice first, although it's a thick, stilted rasp. "I woulda never been paired with you again."

"What? Why?" Her eyes are pricking with tears, but she doesn't care. There's no one else here to see too much.

Elliot shoves his plate to the end of the table, tossing his napkin on top of whatever is left. "Leave it alone, Olivia."

"No. _No_. I've left it alone for years, and not…not anymore. Tell me."

His lip curls, and whatever delicate balance he'd been dancing on dissipates. "Your boyfriend told me straight out that I might find my way back to my pay grade one last time, but he'd come for me. Said if I came back to the unit I'd be gambling your career, too. Told me it was a terrible shame, because you actually had a bright future with the department. If I'd told you that, what would you have done, Liv?"

She hadn't known. In all the months with Ed, he had never once spoken of Elliot. She'd taught Brian and Ed that there were just some things – people - she would never discuss. One was a man she hated; one was a man she…

The truth he's asking for isn't even a question.

She knows what she would have done. They both do. The answer is so deeply entrenched in who she is – who they were – that it is absolute. "I'd have told them we were a package deal. You go, I go."

It's the way he looks at her that makes her press her lips together. His eyes are stark, as if he's lifted the shade to show her the ravaged, guilt-ridden things within for a moment. "Exactly."

Her nose feels like it's going to run. Her eyes are wet again, and she doesn't care as much as she should about how this looks. She focuses on the woman alone at the bar again, trying to will back the years and years of agony that simmer. "I would have had your back, Elliot," she says quietly.

He reaches across the table then and encircles her wrist. She whips her head back to face him again, feeling the pressure of his fingers on her. She can't explain why she doesn't recoil. Why she wants to turn her hand towards his, palm to palm, and watch his fingers slide between hers. Need hits her, and she doesn't even know what the need is demanding. "I know that. But you wouldn't have had your own. And in that position I was in no place to protect you."

She hasn't been this cracked in years. Or maybe the truth is she has never dealt with all the fault lines in the first place. "You cut the cord," she says flatly. He'd said that last night. He admitted he had made a conscious choice to sever them.

His choice. She had just lived with the consequences.

His thumb starts slow circles on her skin. It takes her breath away as she watches him do it, ignoring the goose flesh his touch incites. He's gentle now. His voice is rough, the emotion spilling over enough for both of them. "If one person is trapped in a sinking vehicle, but you can cut another free, allow one to rise to the surface. Breathe. Do you make the cut, or let them both go down so no one grieves the other?"

Her agony is sharp, maybe because he's showing her his. She wants to scream at him, to hit him, to launch at him and tell him that she had breathed, but she hasn't lived for an incredibly long time. She wants to tell him that she didn't sleep for months after he left, that the rejection was so eviscerating she didn't allow herself to even think about him again until she'd been close to dying.

She'd only brought him back then. When she'd been him in a beach house of horrors on Long Island.

Her lashes are wet and her throat closes. "What if I didn't rise?"

It's the first real smile he's given her in hours. "You're the only person I've ever really had faith in, Olivia."

She breaks a little at that moment. It's insane that she has a need for him like this, that her body has not been able to stay away from his touch in the last twenty-four hours. It's as if she's physically seeking heat, light, relief. She turns her face again, the woman at the bar orders a shot and all Olivia can remember is her and Elliot sitting in that spot nineteen years ago.

She'd felt strong then. Tough. She was going to change Manhattan with him. Fearlessness has always been her mantra, but the word morphed over the years. Sometimes it was borne of strength, sometimes it sprung from the numbness. Sometimes the fearlessness had been the result of simply having nothing left to lose.

The memory is so strong she can almost see them sitting there. Her navy velour track suit had been unimaginably soft and her hair brutally short, his khaki overcoat had been a size too big and slung over the barstool to his left. She'd been drinking to erase the feeling of her gun firing. He'd been drinking to erase the feeling of her disappearing on him.

"You know," she says now, so lost to the vision of them that she doesn't even turn to face him. "I never let anyone talk about you. Not good. Not bad. I never talked about you with the squad. With Nick or David or Brian or Ed. You'd earned your right to walk away from the job. You'd earned your peace."

"You think I found peace, Liv?"

A small sob nearly escapes her and she swallows it by chewing on her lower lip as she looks at him. But her eyes are full, and there's no way to hide the oppressive weight of everything.

That's when she realizes he's unnaturally still. His finger has stopped moving on her. The haunt in him is visible.

She can't breathe. She wants his fingers to crawl higher on her arm, over her skin. She needs the comfort of his touch on her elbow, her upper arm. _He's here_, the incongruity of it hits her again and again in the most unexpected of moments.

Olivia remains silent.

"You know the pain of being left, Olivia. But you have no idea what it does to someone to leave you." He forms words but nothing comes out. His nostrils flare, then he mirrors her, tugging his lower lip into his mouth. He glances at the ghosts of them, sitting at the bar. He's watching them too. "Walking away was the last thing I could do protect you. And you'd think that over time…over time the memories would fade. I'd be able to get you out of my head. I kept thinking that one day, I'd be able to move on."

She takes in every detail of him now, and she wants to tell the young detectives at the bar that one day it would come to this. Between them would exist a pain so deep, a chasm so wide that every instinct would scream at them to run. She wants to tell them that no one would ever hurt them the way they would hurt each other. And that they should do it all anyway.

His eyes are back on her, unguarded and raw. "One day never came, Olivia."

He'd paid for their drinks that long-ago night. Twice as many for her as for him. He'd been sober still and able to drive her home. They'd sat in comfortable silence outside of her apartment for endless minutes, as she'd stared at the curb where one of the victims had been left for her to find. The safety she'd felt inside of the car with him wasn't something she had ever been in a hurry to leave.

After he'd left, she's never really found it again.

"So now what?" she whispers.

"We're going to have to go through it. Walk into the wasteland of the last nine years. Diffuse it. See who we are on the other side of it. You tell me all of it. I tell you. Or we won't come through."

He's had time to think about it. To decide.

"And what's on the other side?" She's so quiet she wonders if he can even hear her.

He does. "I don't know. I just know…that I will never leave you again unless you tell me to walk away. Okay?"

She closes her eyes, and his hand slips a few inches further up her arm before he lets go.

The ghosts of them say goodbye outside her old apartment a lifetime ago, assured they will see each other tomorrow.

Another moment they had survived both then and now, but always another unpredictable game of chance that remained ahead.

She nods.

**-o0o-**


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N: **A huge thank you to everyone reading this and especially to those of you who so generously review, it makes my day. Thank you to Brynn, Jess, Tam and Ashley. You know why. Also, on my Twitter (at Lyricara) I have a link to a storyboard Brynn so incredibly made to go along with this story, chapter by chapter, song by song. Amazing images and video clips in order that bring this to life. Also, the insanely beautiful video made by at eogotmelike is there. Things pick up after this chapter, but some things between them needed to be said. All episodes referenced are at the end of this chapter, and this song kills me. Check out the video at alrightabigail made to to that song, I fell for it. And Tam, hope I didn't butcher the reality of the firearms too badly. Love you all.

_**Song: **__Someone To Die For, Hurts_

* * *

It's all glass and mirrors, a rectangular behemoth that holds more power and intrigue than almost any other building in the city.

South of Canal Street and west of Tribeca, the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building rises forty-one stories into the Manhattan skyline, the tallest of any federal building in the United States. In the years since he'd formally completed Quantico and been given his badge, Elliot has never become used to the formalities and impersonal nature of the federal government. The occupants of the building are a broad tangle of security and bureaucracy – the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, Immigration, and the New York Field Office of the FBI.

They had parked her car in the visitor lot and used his credentials to get through the first line of security. He'd authorized her weapon at the second point and marveled at the fact that she hadn't asked where they were going. He'd asked her to trust him, and miraculously following whatever truce they'd found at Chauncey's, Olivia has.

She expects him to punch in the twenty-third floor, and perhaps she has been amenable because he'd told her in the car to head for Fed Plaza, but he has something else he wants to show her.

Despite her time on loan to the Bureau, he doesn't believe she's seen what he's about to show her.

He hits the button for B3 and feels her eyes on him.

When they step off the elevator, he leads her down a maze of hallways. He uses his thumbprint twice to open doors, and then finally leads her through the last one. It's a heavily barricaded black steel door that opens with a flush of air and a green light that illuminates above the doorframe.

The FBI's fairly new, state of the art Firing Range and Tactical Bunker.

One of the perks of being a fed.

He glances at Olivia over his shoulder as he makes his way through the entry and toward the main desk. Staffed by half a dozen personnel, the desk sits in front of the secure hallways of ammunition lockers. Not every agent has one, but those undercover, on hostage response or otherwise necessary tactical duty have one of the nearly two hundred on site.

Her eyes are glimmering, and no longer with tears. She doesn't smile, but he can feel the shift in her mood.

He badges in and makes a few requests as she heads to her left. Through the soundproof tinted glass, she watches the rows of agents line up and fire a myriad of weapons at the various available targets. Twice she silently glances back at him, and he can visibly see her standing a little bit straighter.

For the first time since this morning, Elliot exhales.

They both need this. Porter had called them after lunch and said they'd tracked a single private jet from Treasure Coast Airport - just inland from Port St. Lucie - to Teterboro, with an arrival a few hours before Haden's murder. The jet had been registered to LW Holdings, and they were awaiting security footage from the tarmac at takeoff and landing.

He takes the few steps to her as he waits for his things to be brought out. He ends up standing shoulder to shoulder with her.

"What's it like working full-time for the FBI?" she asks, never looking at him.

The sound of the range doesn't permeate, but he can feel the vibration of the discharging ammunition beneath his feet. The loaded question, the semi-charged air. The slight hint of their reflection in the darkened glass.

Soundproof and bulletproof, it's fragile just the same.

He doesn't know where to start. There aren't ways to explain both the loneliness and his contradictory need for isolation and independence. He has a million toys and resources at his disposal, yet he prefers the undercovers where human intelligence and interaction get the job done. He prefers the grittiness of spending his days on the street, yet also needs the still unfamiliar sterility of the building they stand in.

He only survived because this place doesn't remind him of her.

Except it's because of her that he's here in the first place.

"When I started at SVU, it was a job. Something I thought I'd do a few years. The kids got to me, sure. Reminded me of my own." He can't shake the image of Olivia as she'd been that first year. Dark hair and black eyes, quick to feel too much, laugh too much, absorb too much. He'd been entrusted with her, but he'd been wholly unprepared for her trust in him. "At some point I could have left and still didn't."

The words are coming out wrong, and he's not quick enough to correct himself, so she turns to him defensively, and he can feel the way her breath quickens.

"You wanted to leave?"

It's been less than twenty-four hours since she's been back in his life, and he hasn't really taken a moment to absorb her. The changes in her, the impossible reality that she is right in front of him. He loves the tangle of waves in her hair and hates the haunt in her eyes. He loves the way she straightens with recognition when someone calls her Captain and hates the way she flinches when he calls her Olivia.

He gives her a half-smile. "I couldn't leave as long as you were there."

She stiffens just a little bit. "You could have left, Elliot. If you hated it that much, you knew where the door was, and you could have used it at any time." What she's just said hits her then, and even the in darkened cavern of the range, he can see her pale. "You _did_ leave."

Fuck, he is explaining everything wrong.

He steps closer to her, and his height makes her lift her chin to look at him. He can't let her walk away without understanding. He lowers his voice, and he will find whatever words he's got in him. "I didn't have a choice about leaving in the end. But in all the years before that? I stayed because the job was having your back. Keeping you safe. And fuck if that wasn't the only job I understood. That was the job I knew. The job I wanted. And when you were taken from me-"

Her gaze flies to his, her eyes wide and startled. "I wasn't-"

"You _were."_ His throat hurts like hell, and he's not sure what he's doing. He just knows that she's been decimated by the losses of people she's cared for deeply and she needs to know that every one of them had been lucky to be in her life, despite the end. He doesn't know how to make her understand who she is to him.

His actions have said the opposite for years.

"You're the one who disappeared, not me. Don't act like you didn't have a choice," she hisses under her breath.

"What the hell were you going to do with me without the job between us, Olivia? What the hell was I going to do with us? Tell my wife I still needed to see you every day?" He steps back for a minute, wiping his hand down his face, shaking his head. "Because that's the truth."

The way the rules had suffocated him make the dread slip down his back even now.

There had been no world in which he could have had it all without the free pass of the badge. His marriage had been broken and he'd been too aware of his need. The fucking desire had been a simmering undercurrent in him for years. Without the boundaries of their titles, everything would have imploded.

He would have imploded.

"I was your friend outside of the job -" she starts softly.

"We both know it was more than that. And when I couldn't…" He lets his head fall backwards on his neck. His explanations are a mess. "I took _this_ job because it was the only way I could still have your back. The job you loved - that you were risking your life for? I could do that job from here, too. They gave me a chance to go after the same kind of bastards _here_."

He knows she isn't looking at him. Out of the corner of his eye he can see her turn and refocus on the agents firing at static targets on the other side of the tinted glass.

"Porter said child trafficking." Another hard breath. Of course her mind would immediately work to piece it all together. "Said he found you in my place and…you went UC."

"Porter talks too damned much," Elliot exhales harshly. He wishes to God his bags and the ammo boxes would show up, but he knows there is no more walking away from her questions. Olivia has more than every right to refuse every moment of his proximity until he lets the past shake out, the detonations be damned. "He found me there and convinced me to take a UC. Just like Dana had done with you, Olivia. No different."

She spins to face him again. "Except I had a badge. So what was so important that they needed you and only you? They couldn't even deputize you if-"

"On a technicality I still had my NYPD badge."

She recoils and steps back, as if something struck her. "What? Two years later? You put your papers in. I thought you were done. Cragen said-" her voice trails off.

He shakes his head. "Medical leave. Disability. Cragen and my union rep set it up. I had thirty-six months to make a choice."

Olivia stiffens and turns back to the glass as an excuse. "I didn't know."

"Because you would have spent that time trying to convince me to come back."

He can tell she can't bear to look at him. "So you wouldn't come back to NYPD, but Porter asks and you jump."

"It wasn't like that, Olivia. He found me in your fucking apartment!" He pivots to face her, trying to keep his voice down. "My head was so screwed up-" He stops, realizing how this sounds. He's got no right to claim anguish or agony, because nothing he experienced is even on the same playing field as the brutality she'd endured.

The tension in his shoulders and neck starts to sting. The exhaustion hits him hard, because even before yesterday, he hadn't been sleeping. He hasn't properly slept in years and years. He'd always assumed that if their lives intersected again – if it ever happened – it would have been preceded by time to get his words right.

No such luck. He's here, and he's screwing it all up.

"How is it possible," she finally whispers, "that you've been doing this job for years in this city and we have never crossed paths on a case, Elliot?"

He closes his eyes. There's no way they should be doing this now. Not here, not in the middle of a place he had hoped would help them. The truth is screaming within him, and he knows it's another tightrope they will have to walk. He prays to God she will understand, because he's not sure that he does. Their lives are twisted electrified wires, sparking and burning them at every turn.

The admission sits low in his throat. "We did. Once."

She lets out a pained, disbelieving laugh and shakes her head in disgust, starting to walk away from him. He can't stop her, so he just waits and prays that her curiosity will win the battle.

It does.

She turns and stalks back to him, getting in his face even as she keeps her voice down. "_When?"_

If only he'd made different choices. If only he'd been able to bury the self-destruction back then and he'd been able to face her.

But he hadn't, and they'd lost years and years.

He can think of a thousand other ways he could make her understand and none of them have ever been an option. He doesn't want to talk; he wants to touch her. To make her still. To breathe into her long and deep until she understands.

His voice is thick. "My UC. Porter told me there were websites set up to trade kids, like trading cards. They called it _rehoming_. It was the one thing that made sense, that I could do. I could get these bastards. You were still on leave, and it was my job, my _job_ to pick up when you couldn't. That's what you and I did. We went after the kids. If you couldn't, if you needed time…then I knew I had to."

He sees it. The realization dawning on her face. He sees it as her eyes widen, as color comes back to her cheeks, in the way her eyes glisten with a sheen reserved for disbelief. "Sonofabitch..."

He knows. The timing is clicking in her head.

He'd gone under in early August of 2013. She'd come back to the job in September. By the following January, their cases had collided.

She lets out a hard breath, and her hand comes to her neck as she turns again, nearly pacing as she absorbs the damning information. He's grateful the waiting area is almost empty because they don't need an audience for what is about to unfold, for this dance that they are doing.

He comes up behind her. "It was a network, Liv. Over thirty sites on the dark web. I went under to sell. It was the only way to track who was buying. Then we set it up so local PD's across the tri-state would pick up the kids so nothing could come back on me and blow me in. Staged the grabs as drug busts, thefts, P.O. checks. We made sure local was on point to grab the kids soon after I had placed them, but we sat surveillance until they did. I was under for almost seven months. We shut them all down."

Her face drops to her hands. He wants to touch her back or feel her hair in his palms, but he can't reach out just yet. He isn't sure what is coming next. Her accusations, her anger, her rage.

He deserves all of it.

"Olivia," he wants her to just turn and face him. He has to look her in the eyes when he tells her, despite the fact that she has already pieced it together.

She is talking it out with herself as she stops in front of the wall. "Kaitlyn. Madison. Stella…Nicky. All 'rehomed'. Those websites, they told Cap they were fully shut down a month later." That's when she whirls. Olivia's face is wet, and she angrily brushes away the evidence of her emotion. "You knew who his mother was all along, didn't you? Were you there? When Tino sold Noah to Pearson, were you there?"

He braces himself, keeps his voice low. It's obvious to the few people in the waiting area that they are arguing, but he doesn't want anyone privy to their conversation. It's too personal. Too raw. "Tino told me the baby's mother was dead and that I had to move him, fast. The alternatives – Olivia, he wouldn't have lasted a month. Alexa Pearson wanted a baby. She wanted to play _mom_. A baby doll she could coddle. Everyone knew Roger was looking for one for her. It was the safest option out of a dozen shittier, deadlier options."

"So you just let him go and what, Elliot? _You prayed for the best?"_

He grits his teeth. There's no way she will ever understand. Not when it involves a baby that became her son. Despite the job, she shouldn't understand. "After I handed him to Roger, we stayed on those kids. Then the Pearsons grabbed Nicky. We weren't expecting that. So we watched you track that case, ready to intervene. But you didn't need us." He half-smiles, remembering how he'd been so proud of his old unit. "You guys followed the trail fast, and you made that motel room in the Rockaways." He doesn't know if he's trying to convince her or himself. "I didn't have a choice, Liv. There were too many kids we had to recover, and at the time I had no idea how it would end up. How he would end up your son…_Jesus._ You have to believe that."

It's an impossible request. He doesn't even know what he believes. Being justified and being clear of conscience are two different things. He knows that all too well.

Jenna's shooting had taught him that.

The way she's looking at him makes him think she's going to vomit. "You left kids with a couple on the sex registry for even one minute longer than they had to be? You gave them a baby? He was with them for nearly a month! What kind of job do you do, Elliot? Because it's not the one I do!"

He leans into her, drops his voice. "There were over three dozen minors I had to find before we could shut down those sites, or the kids would have been lost for good. What did you want me to do?"

She shakes her head and puts her hand up. "No. No, just…nothing else." She looks around as if looking for air, and then seems to realize where they are again. She's on edge, so she heads for the corner of the room to get some space, just past a row of low unoccupied club chairs. Her back is to him, her hands in her face and he stands there, trying to figure out what the hell to do.

It's at that moment that the desk attendant finally approaches him. "Agent Stabler? Your equipment is ready, and we have the ammunition you requested at the desk. We have lanes fourteen and fifteen open for you."

He can barely acknowledge the woman. "Thanks," he manages, still focused on Olivia's back nearly ten feet away as the woman retreats.

When he's alone again, he lets out a hard breath. She's blaming him for the risk. For the chance that it all could have been horribly different.

She's justifiably blaming him for leaving her son in danger.

But Olivia has to know he had weighed every option. She has to know that he nearly died inside while handing the baby over, and that he only managed to do it because the lives of dozens of other children hung in the balance.

He made sure he knew where the baby was going_._ The Pearsons were sick, but the baby – _Noah_ –Elliot's gut told him he wasn't in physical danger. The baby would stay in the tri-state area with the couple. He would be somewhere Elliot was able to watch out for him. He knew the other potential buyers, and with them, the baby – _Noah_ – he would have been lost forever. It had come so close.

He can't leave it alone.

Elliot takes the few steps until he's behind her. "If you think," he grits. His lips will barely form the words. He has to make her understand, or she will never forgive him. "If you think I woulda left Noah with someone who I thought would hurt him, you're outta your mind. The other options Tino was considering? He wouldn't have made it out alive. I had orders and a responsibility to stay _under_, Olivia. I couldn't trash months of work. You know how it works and you have to believe-"

His stomach clenches violently, even now. He's watched her in the years since, watched Noah. He'd left both of them in danger at one point or another and no matter what he tells her, that weight will never subside.

"Agent Stabler? I'm sorry to interrupt. But we have a few agents waiting on lanes, so just wondering if you definitely want them?"

They both turn to face the interruption. The face of the returning young woman is apologetic.

Elliot closes his eyes to stop the burning.

It's Olivia who recovers first. "We're ready," she exhales, clearing her throat. "We're ready."

"Excellent," the woman says. "Right this way."

And with half of their conversation unfinished, Olivia walks away.

**-o0o-**

The gun anchors her.

There is a balanced weight to the Glock-19 that is innately comforting. Her right hand is wrapped around the handle, her finger is curled on the trigger. Her other hand cups the weight and steadies her aim.

She blinks behind the shooting glasses, weapon raised, and fires.

Her body stays relaxed, and she lets the recoil slide through her instead of fighting it. This gun is smoother than her old Sig, lighter than her old Glock 17.

Two inches to the right of where she wanted to be. Not good enough.

She exhales. Lifts the gun. Moves it a millimeter to the left. Her gaze is locked in on the heart of her target. Focus. Breathe. Blink.

Fire.

One inch closer to her goal, a hole punches through the paper.

She's closing in.

Not good enough.

Again.

She can't be this broken person anymore. Grief, shock. It all has to wait. She has a job to do.

_I had orders and a responsibility to stay under, Olivia. _

Elliot's words echo in the hollow chamber within her. The job has always loomed above them, a black hole that threatened to suck them into its crux. Neither one of them has ever had perspective. In an effort to save others, they continually danced on the edge of becoming a casualty.

She's holding her gun, and she's back in upstate NY, in her father's cabin a dozen years ago. _I know this is my fault, and if I would've believed you, none of this would have happened. _Simon. She's standing around the doorway from him and they've got the same genes, but she had never trusted him because of them. Now he's gone and it's her fault.

She fires.

Closer.

The feeling of Eddie Sandow's gun in her hand as she tossed it away, and there was David as soon as she had emerged from the apartment, asking her why she'd put her life on the line. _They had a clear shot, you stepped into the line of fire._ She'd been so relieved to see him. She wasn't going to be alone in the hours after, and that had meant more than he knew. _He didn't have to die, _she had said, without acknowledging that she easily could have. Then David's serene, assured expression. _He didn't, thanks to you_. Only now David is gone, too.

The heart of the target begins to disappear.

_Who at the NYPD do you trust? Is there someone at the NYPD who cares if you live, or if you die?_ Locked in a townhouse with two kids, Joe Utley had asked her the questions. Ed had hostage negotiation experience, and something had shifted between them over the years. His voice had been unexpectedly comforting over the line that day. _I got a gun to your cop_, Joe had threatened. _You lie again, and your pretty little girlfriend dies._ He'd still been Tucker to her back then, but he'd been solid. Calm. He'd stayed with her that afternoon, and the trust had blossomed. Working with him that day had reminded her of a rhythm she had still craved with the one person she had needed to be there most.

She doesn't know how he'd ultimately been forced to pull the trigger on himself, but she knows he wouldn't have chosen it. She knows what it takes for someone to pull the trigger on themselves too well.

She fires again.

Then again.

Nearly where she wants to be. To any other cop, she would be dead on, but it's not good enough.

Not for her.

_Pull the trigger, don't even think about it!_

The memory suddenly slams into her and she lowers her weapon for a second, trying to catch her breath. Her eyes sting, and her temples throb. _You've only got one chance, you have to take it. Shoot him! _Olivia exhales hard, pacing her breaths as Elliot's voice ricochets in her head. _Olivia, there's no reason to keep this piece of crap alive. Pull the trigger. Pull it!_ She sees Gitano's face, one of the bastards she will never forget. He'd held her life in the balance as surely as if the gun had been held to her own head.

She lifts her gun now, fast, firing another round. It's right on target. Another.

_Olivia, pull that trigger. Shoot him. Shoot him!_

Elliot's eyes had distracted her that day. She kept catching them and everything inside of her had crumbled. They had both been taunting her. One of the men in front of her had wanted to live and the other didn't care if he died.

Knowing which was which had rocked her irrevocably.

_You better make sure you take me out with one shot. One, perfect shot. _

She narrows her eyes as she hones in on her target now. It has a face. A voice. She's precise, and she takes him out straight to his head. Again. Again. Again.

Again.

Just like that, Elliot lives. He's safe. He's still with her. She looks to her right and he's there, firing his Glock-22. She watches him fire, his stance more familiar to her than her own. _I know you would have taken the shot. _

Like hell she would have. Before Noah, there had been no life more valuable to her than his. Maybe it had been wrong, but everyone else had family, he had been hers. Sometimes even she cannot comprehend all of the knots between them.

All these years, and here he is. Still solid. Still him_._ It's almost painful how quickly he's ripping off the band-aid of her internal isolation. There is a vacuum within her, and she's held that place for him. On the surface she had let people in, but deep down she's held her breath for one person for over nine years.

Right now she can feel the air coming back. It's being sucked back into her, into the hollows.

He is a backdraft in her lungs.

The shaking in her hand begins to subside.

Two bullets left.

Lewis is on the floor then. Her old gun is in her hand. _One move, lights out._ She can feel the medallion on the bottom of her weapon, and it's burning a hole into her palm. She lets it sink into her skin, lets it strengthen her. She channels it because she has to fight for herself as much as Elliot would have. She uses the gun then, hitting the beast hard with it, and for one second she thinks the metal branded him, and that's as it should be.

But she hadn't killed him. She had every chance to execute him with her weapon, and to this day she doesn't understand why she hadn't done it.

She looks to her right again, and this time Elliot is looking at her.

She had failed when it came to Lewis. She should have killed him. It would have saved lives.

Elliot lowers his weapon now, and despite his safety glasses, she sees the resolution in his expression as he locks in on her.

She can fight; she can be the rage. The rage is okay. Her gun is shaking now, and it's okay because he's been there. It is years ago, and it's Rickett. _Go ahead_, he tells Elliot.

Only she hadn't let Elliot take the shot. She'd fired first, injuring the bastard but letting him live. She'd watched Elliot's unfired weapon shake in the aftermath. _Elliot_, she'd called out. _It's over._ But later, Elliot hadn't understood. _Did you think I froze? Is that why you fired first? _He'd been sitting at his desk, hands folded on his stomach and lost in the depths of darkness. _I fired first because you would have killed him._

_He deserves to die. _Elliot's voice had been a rasp.

_Maybe he does. But he wanted you to kill him. He wanted you to remember that you took his life. Not because you had to, but because you were angry. _

Her own voice. Elliot nods once at her, and he's given her back her own absolution and acceptance just like that.

Two bullets.

Through the Plexiglas between them, Elliot's lips lift just a little bit. Over the last twenty years, he has been both the disappearing sand between her fingers and the immovable concrete shelter around her. She trusts who he is as a cop more than she trusts anyone she has ever known. If he'd had to make a choice for Noah all those years ago, then she trusts he made the best choices he could.

He'd made decisions that had given her son a chance to survive. To thrive.

He holds up two fingers. He's got two left in his magazine too. _Let's take them out_, he mouths.

The relief courses through her. The synchronization. The history. The impossible way he's still in her head, and maybe she is still in his.

She turns back to her target then. Takes aim.

She fires once and Lewis is dead. Head shot.

Then again. Moore is down. Head shot.

She's so unerringly accurate she thinks one bullet has gone through the hole of another. She glances at Elliot's target.

He's done the same.

She releases the magazine, efficiently snaps another one in. Then she leans over, into his lane. She sets her gun down on the small ledge in front of him. He switches out his magazine and hands his weapon to her.

He's brought out four other weapons she could choose to use, but the one she needs to be comfortable with again is his.

**-o0o-**

Elliot had stopped in the lobby with her to get two coffees from the Starbucks stand, and it gives him a chance to marvel at the difference in her from this morning until now.

What a difference a few hours have made.

The fragility he's been watching in her eyes is dissolving. There is a burgeoning strength in the way she's now holding herself as she takes the steaming coffee out of his hands and peels back the lid.

"You ready to head up?" He opens his own lid and inhales, letting the smell of the coffee seep into his bones. It might be late afternoon, but he knows that what they learn upstairs might mean their day is just starting.

She takes a sip of her drink, and her lips lift just a little against the rim. "You weren't sending me home today."

It's the first conspiratorial moment they've had, and he's missed this dynamic so much it nearly knocks his voice away. "No. I value my life."

Her eyes lift to his. There is a softness in them that makes his stomach twist. He knows her eyes better than he knows anyone's. He knows every shade and every nuance, and this look hits him hard in his gut, in a place where the sheer beauty of her fully lives. "You were just getting me out of there, weren't you?"

He shrugs and tries to keep his voice light. "Did you want to watch everyone else get to work on this case, or did you want to be the one out there?"

Olivia grins a little bit, and she starts walking with him towards the elevators. Even the pace of her stride is so deeply familiar that he wants to grab her. He wants to pull her with him against the wall and push his forehead against hers and tell her things that she will think fuck up her world.

He wants to tell her things about want and need and desperation and penance.

Instead, he just walks.

Upstairs, he's going to change everything up. Since last night he's given her time to process the losses, his presence, the ache of living without her son until this is over. He's been damned protective about making sure she had that space.

But now it's time for her to be back in charge of this case. If she will ever feel closure when this is done, it will be because she was in control of it and had the ability to hunt this monster down herself. As far as he intends, she will get the full capacity of Assistant Special-Agent-In-Charge Jubal Valentine and his brilliant ops team upstairs. Surveillance, databases, facial recognition. As Captain, she would be focused on managing the fine line between her team and the NYPD brass. Here she will have leeway.

The elevator doors open, and it's just the two of them.

They step in, and he feels the energy radiate off her as she stands next to him. "You held my son. Before me."

The doors close. It's not what he'd expected. He had expected her to come at him for what he'd told her earlier. To blame him for risking Noah's life, to blame him for never reaching out to her during that case.

"And you held mine before me," he reminds her quietly.

She expels a loud breath, and as much he wants to touch her, he does his best to give her some space. The day catches up to her again, and she blinks at him, trying to process what he's told her.

Floor eight. Then nine.

"If he'd gone to the wrong person, El. If he had, I wouldn't-"

There's something akin to forgiveness in her voice and he can't process it.

His fingers curl at his sides and he feels so deeply exhausted by what he's held onto for so many years that he isn't able to say a word. The lies. The self-recriminations. The destruction. The systematic failures in his life, one after another after another.

The ways he's failed her. Failed her son.

She faces forward as they ascend. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. "I don't know how to unravel any of this, El," she rasps. "That you had something to do with my son being safe-"

It's the raw break in her voice that makes him shudder.

He can't take credit for that. At the time there had been no way to know the personal significance of the infant he had held so tightly. He remembers the moment, though. He will never forget the way Baby Boy Doe had peacefully slept, his fist pushing into his mouth as Elliot had fought the nausea and handed him over to the lesser of all evils, praying his gut instinct was right.

For some inexplicable reason she's coming back. "Look at me," she commands.

Seventeen.

When he looks over his shoulder at her, there is a fire in her eyes he hasn't seen in years.

He scrapes his teeth over his lower lip, trying to push back the avalanche of guilt. He can't. It's always been the crumble of a mountainside, tumbling and tossing until it suffocates everything in its path.

Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one.

"I've been so hurt by you not being where I needed you to be all of these years. I still don't think I understand. But it was bigger than that. You were where my child needed you to be, and I just want you to know that for that, I'm grateful."

She knocks the wind out of him with her acceptance. He stands there, stunned. In the middle of a nightmare, the grace of her strength is still an extraordinary phenomenon.

Before he can even process the unimaginable olive branch, the doors open and she steps out, the big bold lettering proclaiming this the home of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's New York Field Office.

He watches her stride into his office like she owns the place, and he knows this is it. Their time to personally readjust would be on the backburner for now.

Now it was time to get Sir Tobias Moore and send him straight into hell.

And by God, he'd make sure the bastard met the devil for a dance before he ever had the chance to hurt Olivia again.

**-o0o- **

**Episode references: **

_Wednesday's Child (S:15)_

_Florida (S:8)_

_Father's Shadow (S:13) _

_Townhouse Incident (S:17)_

_Rage (S:6)_


End file.
